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they present themselves, and to believe the hand-writing on the finger-posts which invariably and solemnly assert that I am within four miles of London, and not in "Arcady's delicious dales," on the "vine-covered hills and gay valleys of France," or in Italy's "love-breathing woods, and lute-resounding waves." But when the fields around me are covered with snow, and fogs and darkness are upon the land, I exclaim with Milton, much the rather thou, shine inward, light divine;" and, betaking myself to my fire-side, lo! the curtain is drawn up, and all the magnificent scenery of classic realms and favoured skies bursts upon my vision, with an overpowering splendour. Talk not to me of the inspiration and rapture diffused around Parnassus and Helicon; of the poetic intoxication derived from quaffing the "dews of Castaly,"-" the true, the blushful Hippocrene,' or Aganippe's rill." Sir, I boldly aver, that Apollo himself, walking amid the groves of the muse-haunted mountain, never shook such radiant inspiration from his locks as often gushes from the bars of a register-stove, when the Pierian " Wall's End" or "Russel's Main," has had its effulgence stimulated by a judiciously applied poker; and as to potable excitements of genius, I will set the single port of Canton against the whole of European and Asiatic Greece, and am prepared to prove, that more genuine Parnassian stimulus has emanated from a single chest of eight-shilling black tea, than from all the rills and founts of Arcady, Thessaly, and Boeotia. I am even seriously inclined to doubt whether the singing of the nightingale has ever awakened so much enthusiasm, or dictated so many sonnets, as the singing of the tea-kettle.

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December is the true pastoral month. For my part, I consider my Christmas summer as having just set in. It was but last night that I enjoyed my first Italian sunrise. I was sitting, or rather standing, with my shoulders supported against a chesnut-tree, about half way down the slope of the celebrated Vallombrosa, watching the ascent of the great luminary of day, whose coming was announced by that greenish hue in the horizon, which so often attends his uprising in cloudless climates. In the opposite quarter of the heavens, the pale moon was still visible; while the morning star, twinkling and twinkling, appeared struggling for a few moments' longer existence, that it might just get one peep at the sun. Behind me the tufted tops of the chesnut woods began to be faintly illumined with the ray; while the spot where I stood, and the rest of the vale, were still enveloped in a grey shade. Immediately opposite to me, two young shepherds had plucked up a wattle from the fold, and as their sheep came bleating forth, they stood on each side of the opening, singing in a sort of measured chant, alternate stanzas from the Orlando Furioso. They had chosen that part of the

8th book, where Angelica is carried, by magic art, into a desolate island; and in the pride of my Italian lore, and my anxiety to "warble immortal verse and Tuscan air," I was on the very point of taking up the story, and quoting the uncourteous treatment she encountered from the licentious old Hermit, when

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a gust of cold wind blowing-in under the door of my room puffed out my sun, and a drop of half-frozen water falling from the ceiling upon my head, owing to the derangement of a pipe in the chamber above, simultaneously extinguished my moon! Ever while you live, Mr. Editor, let your parlour be an oblong square, with the door in one corner, and the fire-place in the centre of the farther end, by which means you will have two snug fire-side places, secure from these reverie-breaking draughts of air; and if before turning up your wind-pipe, you were just to take a look at your water-pipe, you need not, like me, be subject to the demolition of the loveliest sun-rise that was ever invisible. Such are the casualties to which the most prudent visionaries are exposed: but are the plodding fellows of fact and reality a whit more secure of their enjoyments? I appeal to every man who has really visited the classic spot from which I was thus ejected without any legal notice, whether a cloud, storm, the heat of the sun, or some other interruption, has not frequently driven him from the contemplation of a beautiful landscape which he has in vain endeavoured to resume under equally favourable circumstances. His position, somehow or other, presents the same objects in a less picturesque combination; the day is not so propitious; either there is less amenity and richness in the light, or the tints have decidedly altered for the worse; in short his first view, as compared with the second, is Hyperion to a Satyr. Now mark the advantages of the fire-side landscape over that of the open fields. No sooner had I retrimmed my lamp, rendered doubly necessary by the extinction of my sun and moon; composed myself afresh in my arm-chair, and fixed my eyes steadfastly upon the fire-shovel, which happened to stand opposite, than the whole scene of Vallombrosa, the god of day climbing over the mountains, the chesnut-woods, and the spouting shepherds, gradually developed themselves anew with all the effulgence and exact individuality of the first impression. The sun had stood still for me without a miracle, and continued immovable until I had time to transfer the whole gorgeous prospect upon the canvass of my brain. There it remains; it is mine in perpetual possession, and no new Napoleon can take it down and carry it off to the Louvre. It is deeply and ineffaceably engraved upon my sensorium; lithographed upon the tablet of my memory, there to remain while reason holds her seat. To me it is a portion of eternity enclosed within a frame; a landscape withdrawn from the grand gallery of heaven, and hung

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up for ever in one of the chambers of my brain. Neither nor mildew, nor heat nor cold, can crack its varnish, or dim the lustre of its tints.

The "

Fear no more the heat of the sun

Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

exegi monumentum," and other valedictory vain-glories of the classic poets, were very safe auguries, for they were either altogether unknown, or known to be true:

Both bound together, live or die,

The writing and the prophecy.

But I run still less risk in predicting the durability of my imaginary painting, for I can neither injure nor destroy it, even if I had the inclination. In all ethical, moral and didactic writings, how unceasingly are we reminded of the frailness and evanescence of human possessions-a truth which is inculcated upon us as we walk the streets, by those silent monitors, sun-dials and tombstones. Who ever read Shirley's beautiful poem beginning "The glories of our earthly state

Are shadows, not substantial things,"

without a deep and solemn conviction of the utter vanity and fugaciousness of all mortal grandeur: without feeling that it was perishable as the reflection of the world upon a bubble; insubstantial as the shadow of smoke upon the water. Such is the slippery nature of realities; but who ever urged this objection against the imperishable visions of the brain? You may as well talk of cutting a ghost's throat, as of cutting down any of the trees which I now see nodding in my ideal landscape, and which will continue to wave their green heads spite of all the mortgagees and woodmen in existence. Show me the terra-firma in Yorkshire that can with impunity make such a boast as this. Mine is an estate upon which I can reside all the year round, and laugh at the Radicals and Spenceans, while the bonâ fide landholders are only redeeming their acres from the grasp of those hungry philanthropists, that they may be devoured piecemeal by the more insatiable maw of the poor's-rates. Fortresses and bulwarks are not half so secure as my little mental domain, with no other protection than its ring-fence of evergreens. Is there a castle upon earth that has not, at some period, been taken; and did you ever know a castle in the air that was? the traveller, when he beheld the Coliseum in ruins, remarked that there was nothing stable and immutable at Rome except the river, which had been continually running away; so I maintain that no human possession is positive and steadfast, except that which is in its nature aerial and unembodied. With these

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impressions, I should think rather the better of my theory if it were proved to be inconsistent with facts, and should assert more strenuously than ever, that the moral is more solid than the physical, and that abstractions are the only true realities.

But methinks I hear some captious reader exclaim-" what is the value, after all, of your ideal landscape? it is a picture of nothing, and the more it is like, the less you must like it." Pardon me, courteous reader. Some sapient critic, in noticing Hunt's story of Rimini, (which with all the faults of its last canto is a beautiful and interesting poem,) remarks tauntingly that we may guess at the fidelity of the Italian descriptions of scenery, when the author had never wandered beyond the confines of Highgate and Hampstead Heath. So much the better. He never undertook to give us a fac-simile of Nature's Italian hand-writing, or a portrait of any particular spot; but to present the general features of the country, embellished with such graces as his fancy enabled him to bestow: and unless it be argued that every local prospect is incapable of improvement, it must be admitted that combination and invention are preferable to mere accuracy of copying. As well might it be objected to the statuaries who chiseled the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de Medici out of blocks of marble, that they had never seen a god or a goddess. We may reasonably doubt whether the author of the Laocoon group ever saw a man and his three sons enwreathed by serpents; and we may be sure that if he had, and attempted to give a faithful and close delineation of the spectacle, he would not have succeeded half so well as he has. Such matter-of-fact critics might quarrel with Dante for never having been in Hell, and with Milton for not having visited Paradise before he presumed to describe it. Away with these plodders with scissors and shears, who would clip the wings of imagination! If we may snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, so may we snatch one beyond the reach of nature; and if I could be transported in propria persona to the scene of my Italian landscape, I have little doubt that I should gaze around me with disappointment, and finally prefer the imaginary to the real scene.

From the operation of this benevolent system of equivalents, springs the variety of national character, which depends in a great degree upon climate. Luxuriating in the deliciousness of warm suns, cloudless skies, beautiful scenery, and a soil spontaneously fertile, the Italian finds happiness enough in his external impressions, and, considering the dolce far niente as the summum bonum of existence, suffers his spirit to evaporate through his senses, and dreams away life in a kind of animal listlessness. An Englishman is obliged to draw upon his mind for the gratifications denied to his body, and apply to his fireside for the warmth withheld from him by the sun: hence the

two distinguishing traits of his character, mental activity and domestic virtue. It is astonishing that nobody has thought of constructing an Intellectual Reaumur, graduated according to the degrees of cold, and shewing at one glance how much literary talent may be calculated upon in the different capitals of Europe. Up to a certain point acuteness would increase with the rigour of the climate; and in all of the knotty and abstruse problems of metaphysics Edinburgh would be found at a higher pitch than London. There appears to be something in a Scotchman's brain equivalent to the gastric juice in his stomach, which enables him to digest, decompound, and resolve into their primitive elements, the most stubborn and intractable propositions. I should be disposed to assign to Edinburgh the post of honour upon this scale, and to consider this distinction as conferring upon it a much better claim to the title of the Northern Athens, than the fancied resemblance between the Calton Hill and the Acropolis. Farther north, both mind and body must be expected to degenerate; and I should no more dream of ideas flowing from the benumbed scull of a Laplander or a Kamschatkan, than of water gushing from a frozen plug. If my conjecture as to the influence of climate in forming the Italian character be correct, it may perhaps be asked, since the temperature has been in all ages equally luxurious, how I account for their ancestors having built Rome and conquered the world. He is no genuine theorist who cannot annihilate both time and space to reconcile contradictions. But I am not driven to this necessity, as I have only to adopt the theory lately promulgated by Mr. Galiffe, who because the grammars of the Russian and Roman languages are both without any article, and the foundations of some of the most ancient cities in each country are exactly similar in structure, boldly pronounces that Rome was founded by a colony of Muscovites. Braced with all the vigour of a northern temperament, they had time to extend their empire to the extremities of the earth, and rear the magnificent edifices of Rome, before they began to experience the degenerating effects of the climate. In fact they were only an earlier eruption of Goths and Vandals, and did not properly become Italians until about the period of the decline and fall. So far, therefore, from militating against my theory, they afford a beautiful confirmation of its accuracy.

H.