chartered their vetturino at Marseilles or Nice; in certain scraps in the novels even of Thackeray, giving the sense of this gradual occupation of the continent by relays. One of Mr. Ruskin's drawings at Oxford evokes it strongly in me. On what railway journey would he have come across that little town of Rheinfelden (where is Rheinfelden ?), would he have wandered round those quaint towered walls, over that bridge, along that grassy walk?

I can remember, in my childhood, the Alps before they had railways; the enormous remoteness of Italy, the sense of its lying down there, far, far away in its southern sea; the immense length of this straight road from Bellinzona to the lake, the endlessness of the winding valleys. Now, as I said in relation to that effigy of the Alps by the man who had never been abroad, I get into my bunk at Milan, and waking up, see, in the early morning crispness, the glass green Reuss tear past, and the petticoated turrets of Lucerne. Once also (and I hope not once and never again) I made an immense journey through Italy in a pony cart. We seemed to traverse all countries and climates lush, stifling valleys with ripening maize and grapes oak-woods where rows of cypress showed roads long gone, and crosses told of murders; desolate heaths high on hill tops, and stony gorges full of myrtle; green irrigated meadows with plashing water wheels, and gray olive groves, so that in the evening we felt homesick for that distant, distant morning: yet we had only covered as much ground as from London to Dover! And how immensely far off from Florence did we not feel when, four hours after leaving its walls, we arrived in utter darkness at the friendly mountain farm, and sat down to supper in the big bare room, where high-backed chairs and the plates above the immense chimneypiece loomed and glimmered in the halflight; feeling, as if in a dream, the cool night air still in our throats, the jingle of cart-bells and chirp of wayside crickets still in our ears! Where was Florence then? As a fact it was just sixteen miles off.

To travel in this way one should, however, as old John Evelyn advises,

"diet with the natives." Our ancestors (for one takes for granted of course that one's ancestors were milords) were always plentifully furnished, I observed, with letters of introduction. They were necessary when persons of distinction carried their bedding on mules and rode in coaches escorted by blunderbusses, like John Evelyn himself. It is this dieting with the natives. which brings one fully in contact with a country's reality. At the tables of one's friends, while being strolled. through the gardens or driven across country, one learns all about the life, thoughts, feelings of the people; the very gossip of the neighborhood becomes instructive, and you touch the past through traditions of the family. Here the French put up the maypole in 1796; there the beautiful abbess met her lover; that old bowed man was the one who struck the Austrian colonel at Milan before 1859. 'Tis the mode of travelling that constituted the delight and matured the genius of Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and grand master of the psychologic novel. To my kind friends wherever I have any, but most perhaps in Northern Italy, is due among other kinds of gratitude, gratitude for having travelled in this way.

But there is another way of travelling, more suitable methinks to the poet. For what does the poet want with details of reality when he possesses its universal essence, or with local manners and historic tradition, seeing that his work is for all times and all men ? Mr. Browning, I was told last year by his dear friends at Asolo, first came upon the kingdom of Kate the Queen by accident, perhaps not having heard its name or not remembering it, in the course of a long walking tour from Venice to the Alps. It was the first time he was in Italy, nay, abroad, and he and come from London to Venice by sea. That village of palaces on the hill top, with the Lombard plain at its feet and the great Alps at its back, with its legends of the queen of Cyprus, was therefore one of the first impressions of mainland Italy which the poet could have received. And one can understand Pippa Passes resulting therefrom, better than from his years of

familiarity with Florence. Pippa, Sebald, Öttima, Jules, his bride, the Bishop, the Spy, nay, even Queen Kate and her page, are all born of that sort of misinterpretation of places, times, and stories which is so fruitful in poetry, because it means the begetting of things in the image of the poet's own soul, rather than the fashioning them to match something outside it. Even without being a poet you may profit in an especial manner by travelling in a country where you know no one, provided you have in you that scrap of poetic fibre without which poets and poetry are caviare to you. There is no doubt that wandering about in the haunts of the past undisturbed by the knowledge of the present is marvellously favorable to the historic, the poetical emotion. The American fresh from the States thinks of Johnson and Dickens in Fleet Street; at Oxford or Cambridge he has raptures (are any raptures like these ?) into which, like notes in a chord and overtones in a note, there enters the deliciousness, the poignancy of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Turner. The Oxford or Cambridge man, on the other hand, will have similar raptures in some boardinghouse at Venice or Florence; raptures rapturous in proportion almost to his ignorance of the language and the people. Do not let us smile, dear friends who have lived in Rome till you are Romans, dear friends who are Romans yourselves, at the foreigner with his Baedeker, turning his back to the Colosseum in his anxiety to reach it, and ashamed as well as unable to ask his way. That Goth or Vandal, very likely, is in the act of possessing Rome, of making its wonder and glory his own. consubstantial to his soul; Rome is his for the moment. Is it ours? Alas!

Nature, Fate, I know not whether the mother or the daughter, they are so like each other, looks with benignity upon these poor ignorant, solitary tourists, and gives them what she denies to those who have more leisure and opportunity. I cannot explain by any other reason a fact which is beyond all possibility of doubt, and patent to the meanest observer; namely that it is always during our first sojourn in a place, during its earlier part, and more

particularly when we are living prosaically at inns and boarding-houses, that something happens-a procession, a serenade, a street-fight, a fair or a pilgrimage-which shows the place in a particularly characteristic light, and which never occurs again. The very elements are desired to perform for the benefit of the stranger. I remember a thunderstorm, the second night I was ever at Venice, lighting up St. George's, the Salute, the whole lagoon as I have never seen it since. I can testify to having seen the Alhambra under snow, a sparkling whiteness lying soft on the myrtle hedges, and the reflection of arches and domes waving, with the drip of melted snow from the roofs, in the long stagnant tanks. If I lived in Grenada, or went back there, should I ever see this wonder again? It was ordered merely because I had just come, and was lodging at an inn.

The cos

Yes, Fate is friendly to those who travel rarely, who go abroad to see abroad, not to be warm or cold, or to meet the people they may meet anywhere else. Honor the tourist; he walks in a halo of romance. mopolitan abroad desists from flannel shirts because he is always at home; and he knows to a nicety hours and places which require a high hat. But does that compensate? There is yet another mystery connected with travelling, but 'tis too subtle almost for words. All I can ask is, do you know what it is to meet, say in some college room, or on the staircase of an English country house, or even close behind the front door in Bloomsbury, the photograph of some Florentine relief or French cathedral, the black, gaunt Piranesi print of some Roman ruin, and to feel suddenly Florence, Rouen, Reims, or Rome, the whole of their presence distilled, as it were, into one essence of emotion?

What does it mean? That in this solid world only delusion is worth having? Nay; but that nothing can come into the presence of that capricious despot, our fancy, which has not dwelt six months and six in the purlieus of its palace, steeped, like the candidates for Ahasuerus's favor, in sweet odors and myrrh.-Macmillan's Magazine.

HANNAH MORE enjoyed to its full the period of adulation which falls to the lot of most people of note. For goodness, wisdom and genius she was long regarded as one of the world's wonders. Then a change came over society's dream. Saintliness, especially of the evangelical sort, fell into disrepute, along with eighteenth-century poetry. Sneers and taunts began to take the place of panegyric, and the once revered image of Hannah More was stranded high and dry on the shores of formalism and bigotry. In her case there has been no final settlement of claims, and there she still remains, her poetry a byword for all that is unpoetical in verse; her virtues accounted as of less worth than others' vices; her name never mentioned without some such jibing prefix as "saintly," "holy," or "immaculate.'

Writing in her playful vein to Horace Walpole, I shall become an adage of deceit," she says, "and if the next generation should ever hear of me at all, it will be because the present will have converted me into a proverbial phrase; and to say, as faithless as Hannah More, will sum up every idea of female fraud and duplicity,"-little guessing, poor woman, of the position she was actually to fill, that of the Pharisee of litera

ture.

Mr. Robert Buchanan in, we believe, his article on the question, "Is Chivalry still Possible?" after declaring that he would rather be Burns than Saint Simeon Stylites, adds that he would prefer to be lost with Byron, than saved with Mrs. Hannah More. Most would agree with him in the first particular, and choose rather to be a live poet with all his human frailties thick upon him than a half-animate mummy self-perched upon the summit of a pillar. But what reason is there in the second? The presence of Byron might indeed to some people mitigate the pains of perdition. But what was there so horrible about Hannah More, the friend of Johnson, Garrick, Burke and Reynolds, the succorer of the poor and helpless, as to make a man like Mr. Robert Buchanan prefer damnation to finding himself in NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIX., No. 3.

Paradise in her company? How much of the repellent spirit of pharisaism did she in reality possess that her name should have come to stand as a synonym for all that is intolerant and illiberal?

In the first place she was no straitlaced, narrow-minded country dame, but a woman of the world, at home in all circles, in whose hospitable abode, up to the end of her life, were to be met, as De Quincey, a frequent guest, bears witness, those most noted in the world of literature, politics and rank. Boswell, perhaps because she she once snubbed him when, like Tony Lumpkin, he was "in spirits," contrives to give an ungracious aspect to her relations with Dr. Johnson. But from others' showing no less than her own we can see that, in return for the genuine affection she bore him, the old man enjoyed and courted her society and genuinely admired her sprightly wit, which often, indeed, served as a sharpener to his own.

It was to her he made the memorable speech, "Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve beads out of cherry-stones,"-Milton being somewhat of a bone of contention between them, she, with a poetic instinct only equalled by her courage, defending the great bard's "Lycidas," "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" against the critical Goliath of his day. It was Hannah who, seated next him once at dinner, pressed him to take a "little wine," eliciting from him the oft-quoted answer, "I can't drink a little, child, therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult." She, too, who evoked his self-gratulatory saying while showing her over his college at Oxford, his own room, Shenstone's, and those of the other poets whose memory reflected glory on it-" In short, we were a nest of singing-birds." The only time the lenient old moralist was ever really angry with her (and she loved him all the better for it) was when she presumed to quote before him a too racy passage from that "vicious book," "Tom Jones." While, on another occasion, when he made use of an uncon

25

sciously-equivocal expression in the midst of a fashionable company, she, with a frivolity worthy of Fanny Burney herself, slyly concealed her merriment behind some one's back.

We have no more charming picture of Johnson than that afforded in one of her letters home from London, by the gay-hearted Sally More, with whom and Hannah the old Doctor once came to spend the evening, staying with them till twelve, though, as Hannah proudly remarks, it was "only a tea visit," and at that dissipated hour taking leave of his fair hostesses with the enthusiastic outburst, "I love you both-I love you all five. I never was at Bristol: I will come on purpose to see you. What? five women all live happily together!"-with perhaps an uncomfortable consciousness of the squabbles going on among his own women-folk. I will come and see you. I have spent a happy evening. am glad I came. God for ever bless you; you live lives to shame duchesses." His reiterated promise of a visit he fulfilled-though, unfortunately, during one of Hannah's absences from home-in company with Boswell, who has left no record of it.

In the second place Hannah More took no credit to herself for her good deeds, and shrank from nothing so much as from undue praise on their account. "I am ashamed of my comforts," she once wrote, speaking of the sufferings of the poor during a fever, "when I think of their wants.' And again, referring to the delight of her villagers at the present of a wagon-load of coal, "I feel indignant to think that so small a sum can create such feelings when one knows what sums one has wasted." She was filled, apart even from her sense of duty, with the very enthusiasm of humanity, with that spirit of love to her fellows which, to borrow her own words

"Gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all,

And trembles then lest it has done too little."

When the power of writing and of active personal exertion on behalf of the poor failed her, she wrought in their interests at the humbler employment of fancy-work and knitting with such

characteristic energy as to bring on an abscess in her hand.

66

Leigh Hunt, dipping into her writings for the first time, confesses himself"fairly surprised," not only at her good sense, but with her liberal and feeling sentiments. 'How," he exclaims, "could a heart, capable of uttering such things, get encrusted with Calvinism! and that, too, not out of fear and bad health, but in full possession, as it should seem, both of cheerfulness and sensibility ?" The Calvinism, which never affected either her heart of her imagination, was the result of circumstances, inheritance and education. The good heart-that heart which, as Horace Walpole neatly put it, was always aching for others, as her head was for herself-was her own. By how much Hannah More was better than her creed is shown by a thousand tokens, not only of her active, ceaseless charity, but of her genial bonhomie. On the occasion of the procession to St. Paul's to return thanks for the King's restoration, "The poor soldiers," she writes to her sister, were on guard from three in the morning. I would wilingly relinquish all the sights I may see this twelvemonth to have known they had each some cold meat and a pot of porter." The pipe of the Rev. John Newton, ex-sailor and captain of a slave-ship, hung, a cherished relic, on a black-currant bush in her garden, "and that hand," she assures him, "would be deemed very presumptuous and disrespectful which should presume to displace it."

66

As to the imputation of bigotry, there is little trace of it in her memoirs. She sends a kind message to some poor emigrant priests, in whom she and her sisters were interested. And referring to certain French nobles and bishops, she writes, "You should have found out their vices before they wanted a dinner; they had no sins when they were able to give you magnificent fêtes in their own country. Our bounties are not meant to reward their virtues, but to supply their necessities." That the heathen did not less appeal to her sympathies than the Catholics, we may judge from her nobly-indignant poem on the slave-trade, written, it must be remembered, at a time when, to stand

up for slaves was to risk being suspected of revolutionary principles, and in which occurs a glowing apostrophe to the heroic African, Quashi *

"To thee who sought'st a voluntary grave

Th' uninjured honors of thy name to save-” that very name which served Carlyle as a peg to hang his contemptuous references to the whole negro race upon.

"O thou sad spirit, whose preposterous yoke The great deliverer death at length has broke! .

If, then, thy troubled soul has learn'd to dread

The dark unknown thy trembling footsteps tread,

On Him who made thee what thou art depend;

He, who withholds the means, accepts

the end.

Thy mental night Thy Saviour will not

blame,

He died for those who never heard His

name."

De Quincey, who, if we remember rightly, bore Hannah More a slight grudge for having tried to influence his mother to drop the cherished "De" from the family name, as a mere tagon of vanity, testifies to the high breeding and polished manners which prevented her from obtruding her peculiar religious views upon the conversation, which policy on her part, "excellent" as in his estimation she was, and “incapable of practising any studied deceit," he attributed to an instinct of worldly wisdom in her. He adds an item, which perhaps the bright old lady might have more appreciated, to the effect that she was a woman of very pleasing appearance, she being at the time on the verge of her seventieth year. As the pharisees of this world are, as a rule, of unprepossessing aspect, however beautiful her Lucretia Borgias may often be, De Quincey's testimony, with that of many others

Quashi, it may be recalled, was a slave who, having been threatened with the dis. honor of personal chastisement by his young master, with whom he had been brought up on terms of intimate endearment, overcame him in a hand-to-hand encounter, and after addressing to him a few burning words of mingled love and reproach, drew the knife throat, and fell dead before his master's

with which he was armed across his own

eyes.

See Ramsay's "Essay on the Treatment of African Slaves."

who have left a personal description of her, is not without its significance. A spirit of sanctimoniousness would have been sure, by that age, to have stamped its impress on her features; and De Quincey, lynx-eyed observer that he was, would not have failed to perceive and record the faintest trace of such an expression had it been there.

One has only to look into the face of her portrait taken in early life by Opie, with the sweet, slightly petulant expression of its full, delicately-carved mouth, the sensitive yet nobly intellectual features, and clear, bright, serious gaze, and to imagine it lit up with one of its frequent sparkles of mirth; or into that of later years, representing her as much like a little benignant old fairy god-mother as could be well conceived,

to see how little there could have been of unrelentingness in her disposition. "The affection they have for us," she writes of her poor villagers, "is a strong engine with which to lift them to the love of higher things; and though I believe others work successfully by terror, yet kindness is the instrument with which God has enabled me to work."

Those who knew her best, even of those who did not share her views, were least disposed to judge of her"As if the gentle Hannah's heart

Like Alpine rocks were hard."

In them her religious scruples excited a mingling of amusement and respect. "Nine, you are a Sunday woman," said Garrick to her once, Nine being his playful, muse suggestive name for her;

66

you may go into your own room, and I will call you when the music is over." And Lord Orford, who would rally her on what he called the "ill-natured strictness" of her tracts, and address her as his "dear Saint Hannah," cried out once in illness, "I wish I had not scolded poor Hannah More for being so religious. I hope she forgives me. The same remorseful nobleman, presenting her with a superbly-bound copy of the Book," which he knew, ran his inscription, to be "the dearest object of her study," added the testimony which, coming from him, was a most striking and noble one," and by which, to the great comfort and relief of numberless afflicted and distressed individ

66