SHORT TOUR IN BELGIUM.

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the administration of them there was still vigour inherited through the traditions of a great past, and kept alive in the spirit of the public service. The navy especially continued a reality. Having seen the House of Commons and the Anarchies, he was next to have a sight of a Queen's ship on a small scale, and of naval discipline.

The thing came about in this way. He could not work in the hot weather, and doubtless lamented as loud as usual about it. Stephen Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, was going in an Admiralty yacht to Ostend on public business. The days of steam in the navy were not yet. The yacht, a cutter of the largest size, was lying in Margate roads. Spring Rice and his younger brother were to join her by a Thames steamer on August 5, and the night before they invited Carlyle to go with them. Had there been time to consider, he would have answered 'impossible.' But the proposal came suddenly. Mrs. Carlyle, who was herself going to Troston, strongly urged its acceptance. The expedition was not to occupy more than four or five days. Carlyle was always well at sea. In short, he agreed, and the result was summed up in a narrative, written in his very best style, which he termed 'The Shortest Tour on Record.' He was well, he was in good humour; he was flung suddenly among scenes and people entirely new. Of all men whom I have ever known, he had the greatest power of taking in and remembering the minute particulars of what he saw and heard, and of then reproducing them in language. The tour, if one of the shortest, is also therefore one of the most vivid. It opens with an account of the run down the river, the steamer, the

passengers, Herne Bay, Margate, &c. The yacht was waiting at anchor with her long pennon flying. As the steamer stopped the yacht's galley came alongside. The Spring Rices and Carlyle stepped into it and were rowed on board, and he made his first experience of an English cruiser, of a type which is now extinct.

The cutter Vigilant,' which rocked here upon the waters, is a smart little trim ship of some 250 tons, rigged, fitted, kept and navigated in the highest style of English seacraft; made every way for sailing fast, that she may catch smugglers. Outside and inside, in furniture, equipment, action, and look, she seemed a model-clean all as a lady's workbox.

The party dined on board. They were not to sail till the morning tide. The lights of Margate looked inviting in the height of its season, and they went on shore to stroll about and look at the sights. Nor look at them only, for they were tempted into the ball-room, when the Master of Ceremonies came instantly with offers of fair partners. Carlyle looked on grimly; but Stephen Spring Rice whirled away into waltzes, quadrilles, country-dances-not to be moved from the place till the rooms were to be closed. Auld Robin Gray' was sung as a finale by 'a very ill-looking woman.' It was by this time midnight. They went back to the yacht and turned in. The anchor was up shortly after, and before dawn they were far on their way. My sleep,' Carlyle says, 'was a sleep as of hospitals, of men in a state of asphyxia, a confused tumult, a shifting from headache to headache.' After three hours he gave it up and went on deck, when he found the cutter flying through the water. By breakfast they had run down the land

OSTEND.

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-by ten o'clock in the evening they were off Ostend. Even now such vessels as the Vigilant,' with a stiff breeze, can hold their own with a swift screw steamer, while they have the advantage infinitely in comfort and cleanliness.

Ostend itself, with its harbour, its Douane, streets, ramparts, hotels, shop-boys and shop-girls, is described at length and very humorously. I select a single incident only. They landed in the morning, and wandered about the town. They were to go on by train to Bruges after a midday dinner. The weather was hot. The Spring Rices were busy sight-seeing. Carlyle thought he would prefer a bathe, and forgot, or did not know, the regulations. He must himself tell what befell him.

I passed over an unpaved part of the height, and soon sloped down to the sand beach where the machines stood; where some score of ragged women sat sorting and freshening the salt towels, some cheering themselves with a loud song the while; when directly a freckled figure, with tow hair, barefoot and in blue blouse, volunteered in some kind of patois to do the bathing, and straightway showed me into his machine and shut the door.

I was stripped and ready by the time the blue-blouses quadruped, one of the wretchedest garrons now alive, came to drag me in. I was dragged in nevertheless. I opened my door and plunged forward to one of the most delicious tepid sea baths, though as yet somewhat shallow. Alas! I made only some three plunges and a stroke or two of swimming, when the blue blouse, in a state not far from distraction, came riding into the waves after me, vociferating with uplifted hand I knew not what. Wow! Gow! Wow! Nay at length something like Police! Wow! Gow! and evidently expressing the intensest desire that I should come out of the water again. Clearly I had no alternative, with a man in blue

blouse mounted in that manner. On entering I could not but burst into laughing. I found that, men and women, we were all bathing here in a heap, and that among my apparatus were not only two huckaback towels, but a jacket and breeches of blue gingham, which I decidedly ought to have put on first. My three plunges, however, were enough, highly beneficial -and no Police Gow-wow, as it chanced, had meddled with

me.

Dinner followed, and then the railway in the August afternoon to Bruges; Carlyle sketching the landscape on his memory as he went.

Sand downs and stagnating marshes, producing nothing but heath, but sedges, docks, marsh-mallows, and miasmataso it lay by nature; but the industry of man, the assiduous, unwearied motion of how many spades, pickaxes, hammers, wheel-barrows, masons' trowels, and the thousandfold industrial tools have made it-this! A thing that will grow grass, potherbs, warehouses, Rubens's pictures, churches and cathedrals. Long before Cæsar's time of swords the era of spades had ushered itself in, and was busy. Tools and the Man! Arms and the Man' is but a small song in comparison. Honour to you, ye long forgotten generations, from whom at this moment we have our bread and clothing! Not a delver among you that dug out one shovelful of a marsh drain but was doing us a good turn.

Bruges in the thirteenth century had become the 'Venice of the North,' had its ships on every sea. The most important city in these latitudes was founded in a soil which, as Coleridge, with a poor sneer, declares was not of God's making, but of man's. All the more credit to man, Mr. Samuel Taylor.

The eye, Carlyle often says, sees only what it brings with it the means of seeing. The ordinary London traveller on the road between Ostend and Bruges perceives a country finely cultivated. He is

pleased to approve; observes that these foreigners are not so backward as might have been expected, and that is all; Carlyle saw all that, and saw all that lay behind it a miracle of human industry, two millenniums of human history.

As they walked from the station through the streets of that strange old city, they were themselves objects of admiration to the inhabitants. He goes

on:

The Captain' and I had a rational English costume, different, yet not greatly different, from theirs; but the costume of our two brethren did seem to myself astonishing; the Home Commissioner in a pair of coarsest blue shag trousers, with a horrible blue shag spencer without waistcoat, and a scanty blue cap on his head, had a truly flibustier air. The good Charles had a low-crowned, broad-brimmed glazed hat, ugliest of hats, and one of those amazing sack coats which the English dandies have taken to wear, the make of which is the simplest. One straight sack to hold your body, two smaller sacks on top for the arms, and by way of collar a hem. The earliest tailor on the earth would make his coat even so; and the Bond Street snip has returned to that as elegance. Oh, ineffable snip of Bond Street, what a thing art thou!

In the Market-place they passed an authentic "Tree of Liberty,' which had been planted in 1794, and was still growing. Carlyle patted it with his hand as they went by. He admired greatly the quaint old buildings, the pretty women neatly dressed. Among the children he emptied his pockets of his loose money. The door of a magnificent church stood open. They entered in the evening light.

The captain of the yacht, who had accompanied them.