nightingale sings, contrary to what has been affirmed by White and others.”

This is the Scotland of books, and a beautiful place it is. I will venture to affirm, sir, even to yourself, that it is a more beautiful place than the other Scotland, always excepting to an exile or a lover; for the former is piqued to prefer what he must not touch; and, to the latter, no spot is so charming as the ugliest place that contains his beauty. Not that Scotland has not many places literally as well as poetically beautiful: I know that well enough. But you see that young man there, turning down the corner of the dullest spot in Edinburgh, with a dead wall over against it, and delight in his eyes? He sees No. 4, the house where the girl lives he is in love with. what that place is to him, all places are, in their proportion, to the lover of books, for he has beheld them by the light of imagination and sympathy.

Now

China, sir, is a very unknown place to us,in one sense of the word unknown; but who is not intimate with it as the land of tea, and china, and ko-tous, and pagodas, and mandarins, and Confucius, and conical caps, and people with little names, little eyes, and little

It

feet, who sit in little bowers, drinking little cups of tea, and writing little odes? The Jesuits, and the teacups, and the novel of "JuKiao-Li," have made us well acquainted with it; better, a great deal, than millions of its inhabitants are acquainted-fellows who think it in the middle of the world, and know nothing of themselves. With one China they are totally unacquainted, to wit, the great China of the poet and old travellers, Cathay, "seat of Cathian Can," the country of which Ariosto's "Angelica" was princess-royal; yes, she was a Chinese, "the fairest of her sex, Angelica." shows that the ladies in that country must have greatly degenerated; for it is impossible to conceive that Ariosto, and Orlando, and Rinaldo, and King Sacripant, who was a Circassian, could have been in love with her for having eyes and feet like a pig. I will deviate here into a critical remark, which is, that the Italian poets seem to have considered people the handsomer the farther you went north. The old traveller, it is true, found a good deal of the beauty that depends on red and white, in Tartary and other western regions; and a fine complexion is highly esteemed in the swarthy south. But "Astolfo," the Englishman, is cele

brated for his beauty by the Italian poets; the unrivalled "Angelica" was a Chinese; and the handsomest of Ariosto's heroes, "Zerbino," of whom he writes the famous passage, "that nature made him, and then broke the mould," was a Scotchman. The poet had probably seen some very handsome Scotchman in Romagna. With this piece of " bribery and corruption " to your national readers, I return to my subject.

Book-England, on the map, would shine as the Albion of the old Giants; as the "Logres" of the Knights of the Round Table; as the scene of Amadis of Gaul, with its island of Windsor; as the abode of fairies, of the Druids, of the divine Countess of Coventry, of Guy, Earl of Warwick, of "Alfred" (whose reality was a romance), of the fair Rosamond, of the "Arcades" and "Comus" of Chaucer and Spenser, of the poets of the Globe and the Mermaid, the wits of Twickenham and Hampton Court. Fleet Street would be Johnson's Fleet Street; the Tower would belong to Julius Cæsar; and Blackfriars to Suckling, Vandyke, and the "Dunciad." Chronology and the mixture of truth and fiction, that is to say, of one sort of truth and another, would come to nothing in a work of this kind; for, as it has been before

observed, things are real in proportion as they are impressive. And who has not as " "gross, open, and palpable" an idea of "Falstaff" in Eastcheap, as of "Captain Grose" himself, beating up his quarters? A map of fictitious, literary, and historical London, would, of itself, constitute a great curiosity. So would one of Edinburgh, or of any other city in which there have been great men and romantic events, whether the latter were real or fictitious. Swift speaks of maps, in which they

"Place elephants for want of towns."

Here would be towns and elephants too, the popular and the prodigious. How much would not Swift do for Ireland, in this geography of wit and talent! What a figure would not St. Patrick's Cathedral make! The other day, mention was made of a " Dean of St. Patrick's now living; as if there was, or ever could be, more than one Dean of St. Patrick's! In the Irish maps we should have the Saint himself driving out all venomous creatures; (what a pity that the most venomous retain a property as absentees!) and there would be the old Irish kings, and O'Donoghue with his White Horse, and the lady of the "gold wand," who made

the miraculous virgin pilgrimage, and all the other marvels of lakes and ladies, and the Round Towers still remaining to perplex the antiquary, and Goldsmith's "Deserted Vilage," and Goldsmith himself, and the birthplaces of Steele and Sterne, and the brief hour of poor Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Carolan with his harp, and the schools of the poor Latin boys under the hedges, and Castle Rackrent, and Edgeworth's town, and the Giant's Causeway, and Ginleas and other classical poverties, and Spenser's castle on the river Mulla, with the wood-gods whom his pipe drew around him. Ireland is wild ground still; and there are some that would fain keep it so, like a forest to hunt in.

The French map would present us with the woods and warriors of old Gaul, and Lucan's witch; with Charlemagne and his court at Tours; with the siege of Paris by the Saracens, and half the wonders of Italian poetry; with Angelica and Medoro; with the castles of Orlando and Rinaldo, and the traitor Gan; with part of the great forest of Ardenne (Rosalind being in it); with the gentle territory of the Troubadours, and Navarre; with "Love's Labor Lost," and "Vaucluse"; with Petrarch