sible astonishment, and makes the Englishman proud of his native land and people. Then the beauty of the bordering fields and villages, and country mansions; and, as you pass above London, of these and of its princely gardens and delicious homes, is such as is nowhere else to be seen. But, for the river itself, its greatness lies in a comparatively short course. It is not for the river of an island to claim the extensive and continued size of a river of the continent, and which takes its source in the Alps. The island flood, though peerless in its lower course in all those attributes of greatness which a great people has heaped about it, soon decreases to a moderate though beautiful stream; and being accustomed to this circumstance, we islanders feel the same sentiment of admiration and surprise on ascending the Rhine for three or four hundred miles, which dictated those most expressive lines of Lord ByronBut thou exulting and abounding river,

Making thy waves a blessing as they flow.

It is this "exulting and abounding" character which is the great character of the Rhine. Far as you go, for several hundred miles, it is still large, full to the banks, vigorous in its current, and magnificent in the affluence of its waters. No receding tide leaves a hollow and slimy channel. As the steamer ploughs its way, its swell rushes, in living ripples, amongst the grass and hanging flowers on its margin, or scours in curling silver the black adamant of its rocks. People in gay costumes enliven its smiling vineyards; and a life of boats, trade barges, and rafts, moves everywhere on its surface. The rivers of Germany are generally the great highways of its commerce, and its population gathers thickly on their banks. This is pre-eminently the case with the Rhine.

When you land in its towns you then become sensible of their peculiar character, and of the life in their hotels. The bustle that appeared upon the stream, its banks and quays, here has disappeared again. All is quaint, old, still, and none of the sweetest. You see, as you land, plenty of solemn custom-house officers, in half military dress, and well mustachioed. As you proceed through the streets, you find around you gabled and picturesque white buildings, old squares and markets, with avenues of limes, or of dwarf acacias; people, many of them in the garb of centuries ago;

and dreadful pavements. Coleridge has celebrated the six-andthirty stenches of Cologne, and the invention of Cologne water to cover them; but a wide acquaintance with German towns leaves me the conviction that Cologne can boast no more queer odours than any other of the towns of the nation; for in most of them, as we shall have to shew, every street, almost every house, and every hour, has its own appropriate, peculiar, and by no means enviable smell. The pavements, with a few exceptions, are of the most hobbly and excruciating kind. There appears no evidence of any systematic attention to them, or management of them. To pass through a German town or village in a carriage is one of the most rib-trying events in this life. But to walk through one is not much less hazardous. Russell, in his day, tells us, that to avoid being run over on the pavé by a barrow, you often step into the peril of getting your head split with an axe, or your arm torn off by a saw, from the people who are cutting up piles of firewood before the doors. This is pretty much the case yet. The pavés, where there are any, seem appropriated to every purpose but that of walking. There is a bit of pavement here, a bit there, or rather not a bit there. It looks as if the causeway was left entirely to the care, or want of care of the householders. Here is a bit of good pavement; in a few yards is a piece of the worst and most uneven pitching, evidently done ages ago. Here you go up a step, and there you go down one. If an Englishman, accustomed to his well-paved and well-regulated towns, were suddenly set down in a German town at night, he would speedily break his neck or his bones, put out an eye, or tear off a cheek. The towns, and that only on dark and moonless nights, are badly lit by lamps, hung, as in France, from a rope across the street. Here one twinkles, and at a vast and solitary distance glimmers another. Even Vienna is lighted up with oil; and Dresden, and one or two other towns, are the only ones where we have met with gas. All manner of trap-doors leading down into cellars are in the pavés, and none of them very carefully levelled with the flagging or pebbles. Their covers often cock their corners, faced with iron in such a way that you your toes most cruelly against them. All manner of flights of steps, from shops and houses, are set upon the pavement, are pushed out one-third of the width across them, and sometimes

up

strike

wholly across them, so that a man whom daylight and a few trips over them had not made aware of them would blunder headlong. As he fell, a strong iron bar, about a foot long, sticking out of the wall of the house, would probably strike his face and give him a desperate wound. These bars of iron are what the worthy shopkeepers rear their shutters upon in the day time; and at night when the shutters are put up, they stand out naked from the wall about the height of your face or shoulders, and give you the most horrid shocks as you inadvertently strike against them. Then, every hundred yards, you are stopped by a great wood-heap, and its busy sawers and cleavers, or by a wagon or a carriage which is set on the trottoir to be out of the way!

These nuisances, which would not be tolerated in the worstregulated country towns of England for a single week, here remain for ages. The Germans, accustomed to them, avoid them as we should avoid walking into a fire or a horse-pond; and when you point them out, are not at all surprised that such things should be, but that you should think them anything extraordinary.

Such, and the overpowering smells, are the things which first arrest your attention in a German town; but of these towns we shall hereafter speak more particularly. The inns next become the objects of your notice. These are, for the most part, very large, and strike your mind with their great and naked-looking rooms; their great stone staircases, not particularly clean; their large table d'hote rooms, with painted walls and ceilings, naked boarded floors, lots of smoking people, and muslin curtains with festooned hangings, of alternating colours, often of those belonging to the State in which they are. Their uncarpeted chambers, but with generally very cleanly scoured floors in panels of different-coloured wood, the main part, however, being mostly of deal; their little beds, or rather cribs, without posts or curtains; and their peculiar cooking, and serving of the table, are what first fix your attention. All these we shall, hereafter, speak more fully of; and therefore, now, we advance into the country.

Here you look in vain for anything like the green fields and hedge-rows of England, with their scattered trees, groups of beautiful cattle or flocks grazing in peace, and sweet cottages, farm-houses, and beautiful mansions of the gentry. It is all one

fenceless and ploughed field. Long rows of trees on each side of the roads are all that divide them from the fields, and in the south these are generally fruit trees. The beauty of Germany lies only, or with few exceptions, amongst its hills. There, its woods and green valleys, and clear streams, are beautiful; but from one region of hills to another extend only huge and open plains, marked with the road-side lines of trees. The population is not scattered along as in England, over hill and dale, in groups and single residences, of various grades and degrees of interest; while the luxuriant fences, the meadows and uplands charming with grass and flowers, old, half-hidden lanes, and trees standing here and there of the noblest size, and in the freedom of natural beauty, make the plainest part of the country enchanting. All here is open and bald; the people are collected into villages of the most prosaic kind, and no gentry reside amongst them. In fact, what we call country life in England is here unknown.

For ourselves, we became at once struck with this as we drove over the plain from Mannheim to Heidelberg. There is no part of Germany where the open plains are more richly cultivated, and which, with their way-side fruit trees, have a more clothed appearance, but even here how striking was the difference to the country in England! As there is one general character of country, of towns, of manners and appearances, throughout Germany, we shall here confine ourselves, where we are dealing with generals, to the neighbourhood of Heidelberg, for the reason given above, and afterwards, in various parts, point out specific differences and variations.

Far and wide the country, without a single fence, covered with corn and vegetables, as seen from the heights which bounded it, presented a most singular appearance to an English eye. Its predominating colour, at that time of the year, was that of ripening corn, but of different hues, according to its different degrees of ripeness, and the different kinds of grain. This is not planted in those vast expanses which you see in the corn-farms of Northumberland and Lincolnshire, but in innumerable small patches and narrow stripes, because belonging to many different proprietors. Some is also sown in one direction, and some in another, with patches of potatoes, mangel-wurzel, kidney-beans, etc., amongst it,

so that it presented to the eye the appearance of one of those straw table-mats of different colours which one has seen.

Here and there you saw villages lying in the midst of the corn plain, and large woods, but not a hedge, and few scattered trees; the long rows of those marking out the highways, being the only dividing lines of the country. As we passed these trees, we observed that they were principally apple, pear, plum, cherry, and walnut trees. One could not help feeling how these trees would be plundered in England, being set, as it were, by the very road, for that purpose; and, indeed, here thorns fastened round the boles, and stuck between the branches of the cherry trees, where the fruit was ripening, spoke clearly of marauders. Fruit of all kinds was in abundance, and the heavy crops that are common here were indicated by the contrivances to prevent the branches being rent off. Some had their main branches held together by strong wooden clamps, others were propped with various poles; others, especially the plum trees, had their boughs tied up, and supported by ropes of chestnut bark. Some of these slips of bark were so low that mischievous urchins, if so disposed, could easily have cut them.

We passed through several of the Dorfs, or villages. They had a primitive, heavy, and thoroughly agricultural air. The houses are built of stone, large and heavy, and each having a great roundheaded gateway leading into a sort of inner court, or farm-yard. We observed numbers of women at work in the fields, without shoes, stockings, bonnets, or caps. They were healthy, contented, sunburnt creatures, many of them picturesque enough for any painter of primitive life. What, however, riveted our attention quite as much, were the country wagons and horses. The wagons are the oddest old jumbling things imaginable. What a contrast to the jolly fat horses and ponderous painted wagons of the English farmer! The set-out of a first-rate English farmer or miller, to say nothing of the wagons and drays of the London brewers, cannot frequently be of less value than 3007. Most of these vehicles may be worth from five pounds to five shillings, and are drawn by two or three horses a-breast; the horses of a lightish bay or black, of a slouching look and gait, and harnessed in ropes; if there be four, the two foremost a long way a-head of the other two.