where he is most enthusiastically lauding his friends of the United States, he often turns aside to bestow a little of his eulogy on the land of their ancestors. Thus, for example, in his chapter on the outward man of the Anglo-Americans, he says:-

It is a peculiarity of the United States which has often struck me, that there are more pretty girls than in any other large country, but fewer of those imposing beauties which we meet in Europe, and who have their prototypes in a Madame Recamier or Tallien, or thebeautiful Albanian, when I saw her in Rome, or even as you find many in the higher ranks in England, or those noble faces, necks, and figures of the women in the marine villages near Gensano, which made a Thorwaldsen rave-beauties which "try man's soul," which will not depart from the mirror of your mind, and disturb your quiet, though your heart may be firm as a rock. After all, I come back to my old saying, there is no European nation that can-taken all in all-compete for great beauty with the English, as there is no nation where so many pretty and delicate faces are seen as in the United States. Heavens! what an array of beauty in one single bright afternoon in Hyde Park, or at a ball in the higher circles!

Amongst other nations, there are also beauties, for example, the Roman ladies and the Tyrolese men; but I call the whole English nation a handsome one. The very first time I took a walk in London, I was struck with the beautiful children even in that confined city; a handsome English boy of ten years is one of the flowers of creation. Go even to the London 'Change; among the merchants, who, with other nations, surely do not exhibit many specimens of beauty, you find there tall, well-shaped, fine-looking men, whom Frederic I. would have put directly into the uniform of his grenadiers. Call me a heretic-I cannot help it; English beauty outstrips all the rest, and what seems peculiar to that nation, is, that the higher the class in England the greater the beauty, whilst the aristocracy of other European nations is far from forming the handsomest part of the inhabitants.'-Stranger, &c., vol. i. p. 129.

And thus, again, in the conclusion of his most elaborate panegyric on the political institutions of the Americans, he does not omit to give some honour to the old country, comparatively unadvanced as he considers her to be in the practical application of the science of government.

It is my full conviction, founded upon the little knowledge of history I have, and on constant and close observation, that there never was a nation so calculated to solve a number of difficult political problems, as the Americans, descending as they do from that noble nation to which mankind owes nearly all those great ideas, the realization of which forms the aim of all the political struggles on the European continent, and which the historian will single out as the leading and characteristic political features of the present age-namely, elective representation, two houses, an independent judiciary, liberty

of

ruling masses, placed between two such extremes, are sure to model themselves not by the first, but the second. Every species of government has its own whims and oddities-every sovereign his caprices. To please Louis XIV. one must have been polite to eliquette-to please the American people you must be simple even to coarseness. I met with Mr. Henry Clay, the redoubted antagonist of Jackson, when he was canvassing for the President's chair. He had a shabby old hat and a patched coat; he was paying his court to the people.

I found, I must confess it, a singular charm in these indications of a perfect equality. It is so painful in Europe to be eternally running the risk of classing oneself too high or too low-to bring oneself into collision with the disdain of this class or the envy of that. Here every one is sure to take the place that belongs to him-the social ladder has but one step! I prefer, I am free to confess it, the involuntary rudeness of the plebeian to the forced politeness of the courtiers of kings.'-vol. i., p. 228, &c.—Nole.

We have no desire to disturb the effect of this very clever writer's representations by any adverse commentaries. We have felt it to be our duty, in consequence of the obloquy heaped by all the American journals on the recent productions of certain English travellers in the United States, to exhibit at some length the evidence of a Frenchman of high talents and character, who is as good a republican as any citizen of New York, and whose prejudices are all against the aristocratical institutions of the old world. Let this gentleman's book be read and studied,—we have little doubt it will soon be translated in extenso,-and then let Englishmen judge for themselves, not whether a republic or a mixed monarchy be in itself the finest thing, but whether the social results of the American system be such as we ought to envy,-or whether, even admitting that we, as members of an ancient and highly civilized community, ought to do so, it is possible to contemplate with equanimity the long series of strugglings and sufferings which manifestly must be gone through before we could hope to see our whole existence remodelled upon the pattern of what M. de Beaumont emphatically and eulogistically styles Le Peuple Homme d'affaires'-i. e., the Joseph Hume nation.

We shall now give our readers a few more specimens of the German Stranger in America,' but we must confine ourselves to short passages, though we certainly wish we had room for his account of the Battle of Waterloo, which is exceedingly lively and picturesque, so far as it goes, and has moreover this remarkable feature of originality, that it includes no allusion whatever to the fact that Wellington and his English had some share in the day's work as well as good old Blücher and his well-girt Prussians. This looks odd, and yet Mr. Lieber seems to be by no means a hater of our nation; on the contrary, even where

trived the pump? A bold man, indeed, he must have been who first conceived the idea of nailing a piece of iron to the hoof of a living animal. We forget the file, the knife, the sail, the rudder, when we talk of our improvements. We forget what ingenuity was requisite to hit upon the idea of milking a cow, when the calf had given up to receive nourishment from her. The inhabitants of South America do not even now know this important art, and leave the calf with the cow as long as they wish to have milk. It is very frequent to see, in South America, cows either with sore udders, because the calves, having already teeth, injure them in sucking, or with very small udders, because they are left in a natural state, in which cows have not much larger udders than mares.'-Stranger, &c. vol. ii. p. 64.

We must not omit a little anecdote from Boston, which may perhaps furnish an useful hint to the respectable landlord of the Albion in Aldersgate Street :

The following may, perhaps, serve as an instance of the American practical turn of mind. I found, one day, in a street in Boston, a turtle walking with the step which Cicero recommends to philosophers, before the door of a restaurant, with the words, "To-morrow Soup" written on the back of the poor creature, which thus was doomed to invite man's all-exploring appetite to partake of its own flesh. When I stood there and looked at the victim incased and protected by nature against all enemies except the knife of the inexorable cook, as it carried its irrevocable sentence about with it-in the moment, when, probably, it felt as if liberty had been restored to it, after its long and uncomfortable position on the back-and when I thought to observe with some passers-by, whose attention had been attracted like mine, a slight twitching of the corners of the mouth, indicating that the laconic appeal to their palate had not been made in vain-I do not know why, but I could not help thinking of Frederic the Great and Catherine-leGrand, as Prince de Ligne calls her, bent, with a look betraying but too clearly their keen appetite, over poor Poland, which they made to crawl about before them, also with her sentence on her back, before they partitioned her out in very palatable dishes. A Frenchman, in the same case, would have invited to his turtle-soup, by various persuasive means; the taciturn Yankee put an inscription in lapidary style, upon the intended victim itself, making it prove, in the most convincing manner possible, its freshness and fine size.'-Ibid. p. 70.

The author, as we observed before, edited an Encyclopædia Americana; and from that experience he has no doubt derived this pithy apology for the strange mixture of topics in his present performance-(it may serve the same turn for our miscellaneous article) :—' Life,' he says, does not select and classify, does not present things by gradual transitions, but seems to delight in contrasts, and is much like the index of an Encyclopædia, where Locke follows Lobster, where Lace precedes Lacedaemon, and Shakers is the neighbouring article to Shakspeare.'

ART.

ART. II.-Reise um die Erde, ausgeführt auf dem koniglich Preussischen Seehandlungs-Schiffe Prinzess Louise, commandirt von Capitain W. Wendt, in den Jahren 1830, 1831, und Von Dr. F. J. F. Meyen. 2 vols. 4to. Berlin. 1834.

1832.

WE quite agree with Boswell, that one is carried away with

the general, grand, and indistinct notion of a voyage round the world.' Let Johnson talk as he will, there is a misty vastness about such enterprises, a sense of the marvellous and dangerous inextricably mixed up with them, that delights and expands the mind, even though, particularly since the recent multiplication of circumnavigators, we may not be well able to justify our impressions to ourselves by any rational hope of fresh and really valuable discovery. But a voyage round the world by a German differs materially from a voyage round the world by an Englishman: they see with different eyes, and refer to different standards of comparison, so that the same objects which have begun to grow wearisome in the descriptions of our own countrymen, may strike again with all the interest of novelty when placed in the point of view taken by a foreigner. The truth of this observation will appear from the passages we are about to quote from the book before us; which is the work of a scientific gentleman, of competent intelligence, commissioned to accompany a Prussian expedition in the double capacity of surgeon and naturalist.

6

Twice already' (says he in his Preface) had the royal Prussian flag circumnavigated the globe, before I had the happiness to be attached to a trading expedition, undertaken, chiefly with a view to South America and China, by orders of the Royal Merchant-Marine. The splendid ship which was destined for this adventure has the honour to bear the august name of Princess Louisa, having been christened after her Royal Highness the youngest daughter of his Majesty our King, by marriage the Princess Frederick of the Netherlands. Once already had this ship successfully circumnavigated the earth, and wherever we touched she was received as a familiar guest.'

The politeness with which this gentleman speaks of the ship which had the honour to bear the august name of a Prussian princess, &c., bears no very distant analogy to that of the Frenchman (mentioned by Miss Edgeworth) who talks of the earthquake that had the honour to be noticed by the Royal Society; but it is only on very rare occasions that Dr. Meyen indulges in this style.

'Although' (he continues) the object of our expedition was quite different from that of voyages of scientific discovery, still, through the gracious favour of his Majesty the King, many opportunities have been afforded me of visiting places which had remained more or less unknown to the scientific public; I therefore consider it a duty to communicate

communicate a detailed report. I have divided my materials into a personal narrative and a scientific department; the former occupies the two volumes which I now publish the other will appear hereafter.' He begins with his departure from Berlin: the following are his reflections on that occasion:

On July the 28th, 1830, at nine o clock in the evening, we left Berlin, attended by the good wishes of relations, friends, and acquaintances. It is not easy to sketch the leave-taking on beginning a journey of such extent as we contemplated. The hope of seeing the paradisiacal regions of the world-of mounting the heaven-aspiring Cordilleras, with their mighty summits and volcanoes-of seeing the natives of the South Sea in their state of nature-of visiting the farstretching country of the Chinese, rich in singularities of all kinds; all these are thoughts which so vividly engage the heated fancy of a young man who has devoted himself to the study of nature, that it is not until the moment of departure, not until the hour of leave-taking, that he becomes sensible of the difficulty of separating himself from the circle of ordinary resort, of tearing himself away from all with which he is connected by the ties of blood, of friendship, and of tenderness. In such moments, forebodings arise in the soul of man, from which he cannot guard himself. We quitted home, and, by an unlucky accident, received no letters during the whole period of the voyage; and what revolutions, what national calamities, had been in the interval endangering the peace of Europe!'

Notwithstanding our traveller's vivid expectations from the New World, he devotes several pages to objects, now familiar to most of us, in the Old; as the badness of the road between Berlin and Hamburgh-the beauty (which he greatly exaggerates) of the suburban villas on the banks of the Elbe-and the attachment (which he unduly depreciates) of the citizens of Hamburgh to the official costume, wigs, lace-collars, and so forth, of their forefathers. He has also inserted a tabular view of the coffee trade of Hamburgh and Altona, from 1815 to 1829; from which it clearly and satisfactorily appears that the yearly imports are 324 millions of pounds; and the exports and home consumption-321 millions!!

At the mouth of the Elbe, off Cuxhaven, they stop to take in water; a highly important ceremony, upon which Dr. Meyen avails himself of the opportunity to expatiate :

'Although every one who has been long at a time on shipboard knows the value of good water, it must notwithstanding be observed, that messieurs the captains, in taking in water, set to work with singularly little care. The health of the whole crew, on an expedition of this extent, is dependent on the quality of the provisions and water; if these be good, the people can resist even the worst climate for a much longer period than otherwise. In the ports of North Ger

many,