dence is sufficient to refute. The prejudices of men and the intolerance of manners may do their worst to separate the interests and affections of mankind; but the intelligent Bohemian will hardly see the future destruction of society in the very attempts which some are making to mitigate the evil. We are reforming our predatory Arabs, and who knows but we may annex Bohemia at last, and not be the worse for the conquest.

We give Mr. Whitty's notions of a peculiar class of London Bohemians-the cabmen-as a happier specimen of his manner:

"What an injured race are the cabmen! They are the sailors of great cities; sailors in the uniformity of their reckless attire, and their countenances reddened and hardened by weather exposure, and in the peculiar slang with which, using professional terms, they speak of all mundane affairs. They are sailors in republican contempt for worldly dignities and dignitaries. As sailors have deep contempt for all who do not understand ships, cabmen despise every intellect unconcerned with horses. They are sailors in their intense acuteness and decided inclination to swindle. Yet sailors-dirty, improvident, dishonesthave a poetical position among men, and, except among shipowners and captains, Jack has the merit of a jolly dog, innocent as a puppy, prettily playful. Jarvy has no novelists and no defenders; for the street is not the sea, and we miss the sixpences extracted from ourselves. When we sit in the cab and look at the statue-like heap of old clothes on the box, steering us through the traffic of London, we feel towards him as if he were the inevitable foe- -as Cape soldiers regard a Kaffir-as Christians once regarded the Jews. His affecting devotion to his horse, whom he drives slowly in conviction of the risks of a rapider pace, meets with no sympathy from us: we consider the quadruped as in league with the driver.'

It would explain very much the faults and the merits of this book if the author turned out to be an American. There are in it views of society which in an Englishman would suppose a very offensive cynicism, but which any one, not a native, might entertain, out of mere indiscriminating indignation at the strong contrasts of our social life, and express or imply, as he does, without a consciousness of their exaggeration. But if, instead of portraying scenes and characters which would be odious and repulsive anywhere, and holding up to observation sentiments and conduct which are just as destructive of happiness and unsatisfactory in their results in Bohemia itself as they would be in the inmost circles of respectability, the novelist had given us a true picture of the peculiar relations to general English society of literary men and artists, he would have done a good work. The difficulty in which a man of ability and sense is placed between the indignity of being lionized' by foolish and unsympathetic

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people,

people, and the injury to his own intellectual and moral nature from the habit of living with admiring friends and obsequious followers cannot be overrated. The problem how to retain his self-respect and to do justice to the motives and intentions of others who are really desirous to esteem and honour him, is one that every man in this position must solve as he best can, and we believe that a fair combination of genial Bohemian independence and of gentlemanly feeling is requisite to do it successfully. Genius will never find the path of life smooth, for it has to make the road it travels; but let every man in our day believe that if he has greatness within him, his time will not fail to arrive. We probe deeply-we test jealously-we reject cruelly; but we are hero-worshippers of all high faculties as well. Chatterton passed away in the agony of unrecognised power and unanswered demands on the interest of his fellow-men, and years afterwards multitudes of eager eyes and sympathetic hearts crowd for months together round the representation of that death-pallet in the Manchester Exhibition, while over the entrance of that palace of art were inscribed in gigantic letters the first words of the chief poem of John Keats, who prayed that on his tomb might be written, 'Here lies one whose name is writ in water.'

ART. III.--Six Months in Italy. By George Stillman Hillard. London, 1853.

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HE only countries, says Alfieri, that leave on the_memory the impression of affectionate regret are Italy and England; and though we cannot expect the other members of the European commonwealth to subscribe to this limitation of the constitutionloving poet, few would dispute the pre-eminence he claims for Italy. No one has lived much in that land of beauty without feeling that it has spread over him the spell of a second home. Angelica Kauffmann declared that when she finally settled in Italy she felt her powers revive, and Winckelman, when he retired to Zurich, after a twelve years' stay in Rome, was attacked by a fit of nostalgia, such as it is usually thought only Swiss mountains can cause, nor did he recover his health and spirits till he decided on returning to the country of his adoption.

No greater proof of the general homage paid to Italy can be adduced, than the large space she occupies in the literature of northern nations. In this country the works of fiction, narrative, and description, of which she is the theme, would form no inconsiderable department in the national library, and no wonder.

Italy is associated with our first lessons of history, our earliest admiration of genius, our awakening love of art. Unseen, she is the land of hope and promise-once seen, she is ever after the source of pleasant memories. The homestaying painter or poet, when he is weary of the trammels of reality, carries his imagination to a region of fairy-land, which he calls Italy, and here he summons before him the abstractions of ideal beauty and superhuman sensibility-men all fire, and women all love; a literature all poetry, a language all music; seas all blue, and skies without a cloud; palaces of marble, hedges of myrtle, orange groves studded with antique statues, peasants dancing in fancy ball dresses, under vine-covered trellices, and a youth with bare legs singing all day to a guitar. This is not Italy. But with this idea of it the untravelled public are so familarised, that they will scarcely accept any other; and it is curious to observe how long in the tourist's mind this conventional type, which he has brought out with him, prevails over the reality which he sees spread before his eyes. And yet this gaudy image is greatly inferior to the real Italy. It is what we so often see in the productions of the portrait-painter, a likeness idealized till it has lost all character and greatly flattered in its ordinary features, but yet doing no justice to the higher beauties of feeling and expression.

The appearance of a new tour in Italy naturally suggests a comparison with its numerous predecessors. We do not say with the sagacious Fadladeen, whom the lively author of Lalla Rookh has set up as the type of all reviewers, that in order to estimate the volumes before us, we must pass judgment on all the tours that ever have been written. But this branch of literature has reached a point which invites a retrospective glance. The annual stream of tourists' publications flows with a languor which shows the demand has slackened. It is worth inquiring how they have treated their subject hitherto, and how far they may be accepted as guides by the future traveller.

But before we proceed, we beg at once to express our acknowledgments to Mr. Hillard for the pleasure his volumes have afforded us. His tour was short and hurried, such as perhaps would not in this country have led to a publication, except in the case of an author so popular, that his publisher is always eager to get him before the public; or a man so eminent, that the world is anxious to know not what he saw, but how he was impressed by it. But Mr. Hillard is a citizen of the United States, and in his country the taste for European travelling is only lately awakened. To American readers the subject appears less hackneyed, and to those who are pressed for time it is a matter

of

of no small interest to know how an intelligent countryman thought he could economize six months to the best advantage. Mr. Hillard's work is that of a scholar and a gentleman, a man of sense as well as of taste and feeling, and well prepared by his previous reading to appreciate his subject. He writes without egotism, personal or patriotic, he has no systems to support nor prejudices to defend; his views are always liberal and benevolent, and if not always, in our opinion, right, he is always candid. His style is pointed, and is full of happy expressions and striking images; occasionally it is to our taste a little too ambitious, and his illustrations, though ingenious, seem to us fanciful and far-fetched; the anxiety (perhaps derived from his profession) to enforce a point, leads now and then to exaggeration, not indeed of fact, but of expression. These blemishes, however, are but slight, and our mention of them must be taken as a proof of the sincerity of our general praise.

A tour may be wholly subjective, and may be in fact a fragment of autobiography; or it may be wholly objective, and describe only visible objects. The writer may take as a model Sterne's Sentimental Journey,' which no one ever consulted as a book of travels; or Marianne Starke's miscellaneous list of prices, sights, and inns-where the washerwoman and the Coliseum figure side by side-which no one ever took up as a book of amusement. Between these two extremes all tours must range, and in the intermediate space the author arranges his stores of criticism, narrative, history, sentiment, or science, or whatever else he can collect for display.

The tourist to whom, in his own eyes or those of the world, self is the most important object, naturally keeps nearest to the terminus of autobiography. Göthe's tour forms part of the narrative of his life; and therefore, without taking into calculation the enthusiasm of his admirers, he has a right to consider that the chief interest of all he sees is derived from the impression it makes on himself, and the effect it has on the culture and discipline of his own mind.

Mr. Beckford, in his well-known letters, treats every object with reference to his own individual sensations at the moment, and evidently conceives that to yield unresistingly to every fugitive impulse is the criterion of genius and susceptibility. Pages are devoted to plums and muscadine grapes, and the most romantic scenery is left unnoticed. At Venice, on a hot day, he rushes into the Adriatic, and, according to his own account, would have forgotten to return, if the incoming tide had not floated him back to shore. In the bleakest part of the Tuscan Apennines, and in a dark night, a host of thick-coming fancies' oblige him to leave

his chaise and plunge into the deepest shadows of the mountain.' At Rome he sees nothing but St. Peter's, and the use he wishes to make of it is to exclude all the rest of the world and to put up beds in it for himself and his correspondent. At Mantua the moustache of an Austrian sentinel prevents his contemplating the medieval splendour of the Gonzagas; and at the gallery at Florence he is so sensitively alive to the various conflicting claims on his attention, that he would have seen nothing if fortunately his irritable susceptibility had not been lowered to the point of ordinary use by the sight of a very tasteless statue of Morpheus. How far he took the trouble of acting up to his conceptions of the mode in which a man of genius should travel is known only by tradition, but his lively and brilliant sketches unquestionably show us how a man of talent can write.

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Tourists of his class, however lively their fancy and vigorous their style, are worse than useless as practical guides to ordinary travellers. Let Brown, Jones, and Robinson,' with whose adventures the lovers of caricature are so familiar, beware of the eccentricities and idiosyncracies of genius. We must especially protest against a piece of idleness or affectation, which is vaunted as a merit by numberless authors, and which it is most unwise, though often tempting, to imitate. Let the tourist be assured it is a want of curiosity, and not an excess of sensibility, which makes him 'hate all sights except such as he finds out for himself,' and refuse to be led about by a jabbering showman.' Now, the law on the subject is perfectly clear. No free-born traveller who pays his own expenses is obliged to see sights if he does not like it. Nay, so far as the difference of times and circumstances allows, he may imitate the contumacious prodigal of the last century, who being sent in the stately style of the day, in his 'postchaise' and with his 'governor'-then denoting a travelling tutor, and not used as a slang word-to make the 'grand tour and to see the world, defeated his anxious parent's calculations by sedulously keeping the blinds drawn. But if the tourist has engaged himself to write, or dimly foresees that the popularity of his letters and journals among his own circle will make publication inevitable, he is bound to qualify himself for the task by seeing and learning all he can. No doubt a 'laquais-de-place' may often be 'a bore,' especially when we do not understand his language. But there is no rational reason for rejecting his services except the dislike of paying for them. The possession of a great deal of inspiration may be allowed to the wayward children of genius, but there is no well-attested case where a knowledge of topography has been miraculously imparted. No well-informed reader can sympathise with a reluct

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