of his station and character. The second, Bishop Lavington, in his Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists compared, has drawn a parallel between two religions, externally dissimilar, but certainly partaking of a quality from which neither churches nor individuals are always secure. Of this work, the methodists, it is said, both felt and feared the power; so that great pains are understood to have been taken in buying up and suppressing the copies. Nor is this to be wondered at; for the bishop's facts are strong,-his reasonings acute, his reading, especially in fanatical popish legends, extensive, and his style classical.-Yet of this work, as of the Doctrine of Grace, every serious mind is offended by the levity, while it would often be delighted with the wit, had its object been legitimate. Warburton, however, far surpasses his brother in brutality of invective, not to mention the peculiar demerit of using the most awful language of scripture with an irreverence approaching to profaneness. It is indeed no easy task to aim the darts of wit and ridicule against the shadows and visions of enthusiasm, without wounding that venerable form, which always lies beyond them. In this controversy, it is the manner only, not the purpose, which we condemn. Enthusiasm is a pernicious spirit, and ought to be exorcised; but it goeth not out' by means of scurrility and abuse.-Always an object of apprehension to the state, it is universally destructive, in its progress, to religion itself. It is either wholly consumed in its own flame, or leaves nothing behind but the smoke and cinders of a spent volcano. The Socinians of the present day, it must be remembered, are the lineal descendants of the fanatics of the seventeenth century.

Passing over, from want of space and not of inclination, the minor works of Warburton, we now take leave of this wonderful man, with sensations, whether of pain or pleasure, not likely to be repeated. In contemplating the productions of such a giant, our scale of human intellect is insensibly extended, and we feel like the artist who had been employed in modelling from the Jupiter of Phidias, when he turned his eyes to the features or the stature of mortals.

In the progress of little more than thirty years, what has not literature, and what the church of England lost in Warburton, Lowth, and Horseley and (though he attained not to the first three) in Hurd himself!-Under this melancholy impression, we had almost said senescit ecclesia:'-with all our respect for living talent and erudition, we look around in vain for any thing similar or second to these men: their mellow and high flavoured fruits have been gathered, and we feast upon them deliciously; but it is with the regret of those who eat the fruit of an expiring species; for what, alas! is the crop which is now ripening, and where are the blossoms which promise to perpetuate the succession?

ᎪᎡᎢ .

By

ART. XIII. Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern
Parts of Spain and the Balearic Isles, in the Year 1809.
Sir John Carr, K. C. London; Sherwood, Neely and Co.

1811.

FOR many months past the record of the last adventures of this renowned knight-errant has encumbered our table and our conscience. Resolved as we were to pay his 400 pages the reasonable tribute of some notice, we yet from day to day postponed this duty, and are now only driven to it by an alarming rumour that Sir John is about to launch another quarto; to be ready to grapple with which, we must endeavour to dispatch, with all possible expedition, its predecessor: if we were to wait till he had heaped Pelion on Ossa, we doubt whether we should ever be able to free ourselves from the incumbent mass.

Not that we would be understood to insinuate that Sir John's works are heavy ;-far from it.We should rather describe them to be somewhat like the volcanic showers in the West Indies, of which we have lately heard so much; a heavy fall of the lightest of all natural substances, accompanied with almost total darkness. If Sir John Carr wearied and perplexed us only, we could bear it; but the busy trifling, the dull restlessness, the inaccurate minuteness, and the presumptuous ignorance of such a traveller, are vented not on the reader or reviewer alone; they have before fretted and disgusted the society which he visits, and disparaged the country which sent him forth: Sir John Carr was, to our knowledge, as intolerable, in propriâ personâ, in Sweden and Ireland, as his attempts at describing these countries have proved in England. He is not so much a traveller as a spy and gossip; a great collector of small anecdotes and petty scandal, of bad jokes, of inaccurate moral, and of worse natural history. To say all, in one word, a laborious collector of trash.

Sir John has dropped, on this occasion, his old title of stranger; he was a stranger in Norway, a stranger in France, a stranger in Ireland, and, we believe, in Scotland; but he is no stranger in Spain, and he takes early and frequent opportunities of exhibiting his profound intimacy with the Spanish language, customs, and history.

In the second page he opens his stores of Spanish erudition upon us in a quotation from a worthy Spanish writer,'

'Quantos payzes tantos costumbres,'

which, he informs us, means

As many countries, so many customs.'

And

And this recondite observation he recommends to be carefully digested by all those who desire to understand the scope and nature of his work.

6

On his passage to Cadiz in the Falmouth packet, he sees 'some curious natural effects,' which he notices with laudable minuteness. At night he found the air to possess the astonishing qualities of being soft and fragrant.'--Nay, when the moon shone, the tops of the waves were illuminated;' and in the morning some flying fish were visible, whose fate it is to be pursued by fishes below and by birds above.' p. 45.

Travels beginning with such extraordinary events excite expectations in the reader, which will not, we assure him, be disappointed. The knight is at first a little disgusted at the dirt and noise which met him on his landing at Cadiz: amidst this confusion, he is particularly struck with the boatmen going over to port St. Mary's, and bawling out, Puerta! Puerta! which Sir John tells us ineans Porters! Porters! (p. 6.) Why the boatmen should call for porters, we cannot discover; and if Sir John had not assu red us to the contrary, we should have thought that the exclamation of Puerta,' (in our dictionary, the Port,) referred rather to the place to which the boats were going. What would Sir John think of a Spaniard who should say, that being about to take water at London-bridge, the boatmen cried out Greenwich! Greenwich! which means *Ganapan! Ganapan!'"

6

The entrance to the theatre affords Sir John another opportunity of exhibiting his attainments in Spanish; a friar,' he tell us, sits near the door-keeper with a poor box, into which he invites you to put the change, por las almas, for charity.' We, who are less skilled in Spanish, should hardly have ventured on so bold a paraphrase of por las almas.'

Sir John is a great linguist; he tells us that the Spaniards light their pipes with a kind of tinder, which the French call amadon:' we should have suspected this to be an error of the press, but that it is not to be found in the long list of errata subjoined to the work.

Sir John gives us some interesting information on the state of the markets at Cadiz, and the method of killing the ox with a stiletto, which is,' he pronounces, worthy of imitation;' and he adds, that'Lord Somerville, to his honour, is endeavouring to introduce the stiletto amongst English butchers.'--p. 23. We hear, also, with great satisfaction, of a new source of trade lately opened to the sister kingdom. Sir John states, (p. 23,) that in some houses, oil is imported from Ireland,' and used instead of butter. We should rather have supposed that butter was the im

Ganapan, a porter who carries burdeus.'- -Dictionary.

ported

ported article; but Sir John's assertion is not, we candidly confess, under any grammatical construction, reconcileable to this notion of

ours.

In the interior of the houses he informs us that a brazen pan of powdered charcoal, called copa, placed on the floor, is, on a cold day in the winter, a substitute,-for what? Our readers will probably say for a hearth, or fire, or grate; but no; it is a substitute for a chimney-piece, which is an article very unusual in Spain.'

Sir John winds up his interesting description of Cadiz by stating that the people of Cadiz have been always particularly attached to the English, and he seems to account for this partiality from their having seen so much of the Scotch and Irish. We could hardly have expected that the Stranger in Ireland, and the author of Caledonian Sketches, would have ventured upon so equivocal a compliment to those two countries.

Nor is Sir John more distinguished for his tasteful selection of modern anecdote, than for his allusions to antiquity, and the use of his classical and biblical learning. He acquaints us that the mode of thrashing (still practised in Spain) by treading out the corn, is, as he is informed by the scriptures, coeval with the time of Moses;' p. 72. that bull-fighting owed its origin to a violent plague, which raged chiefly amongst pregnant women, many of whom procured abortions by eating bulls' flesh;' p. 65. and that 'Spain was by the ancients determined to have been the garden of the Hesperides.' p. 74.

The profundity of some of his observations can only be equalled by the apt and lucid arrangement in which he disposes them.

'At Libraxa, (he states,) I observed that our calesa (the carriage in which he had been some days travelling, though till now he had taken, it seems, too little notice of it) was decorated on all sides with rude paintings of Virgins and apostles, and that the following motto was inscribed on the back, "Viva la Virgin del Carmen;" and also that the pigs of the town were remarkably fat and beautiful.' p. 72.

At Seville he notices a most surprising fashion, and a very pleasant jest which it produced; many of the pretty women wore when dressed, natural flowers, tastefully fixed upon the upper braid of their hair: a cruel wag observed that this was necessary to counteract the atmosphere of some of them, who were more than moderately fond of garlick.' p. 90. We vehemently suspect that it was no other than the knight himself, who was on this occasion so cruel waggish.

In the table of contents of the seventh chapter we find the following strange association of topics. Velez Malaga-Pride of the Muleteers-Lord Edward Fitzgerald-Alhama-Travelling 'Information.'

Information.' How Lord Edward Fitzgerald could be implicated in the other promised subjects we never could have guessed; but Sir John brings it about as naturally as possible.

The muleteers have the reputation of being high spirited fellows, very proud, and full of the dignity of their country. A guide is commonly called a mozo de espuellas, or groom of the spurs. When the unfortunate Lord Edward Fitzgerald was in this part of the country, several years since, one of the muleteers who attended him, upon their reaching the place to which they were hired, said to his comrades, this man is a duke; he is one of us, and we must not charge him any thing.'

The following equally acute and novel way of accounting for vallies being better cultivated than mountains, though stated by Sir John with regard to Spain only, seems capable of a more general application.

In Spain, the rains descend with such fury, as to carry away the greater part of the vegetable mould, upon the surface of the mountains, which will account for the low lands being in general so highly cultivated.'

At Valencia he makes some equally ingenious and valuable observations: Fish boiled with rice,' he finds a favourite dish at dinner:'-and' such is the fecundity of the pigeons of those parts, that they lay two eggs in twenty-four hours. Sir John has also been at the pains to assure us, that it is calculated that not less than seven thousand turkeys are exported from the kingdom of Valencia to Cadiz.' (p. 240.)

Such are the observations, moral, political, historical, and philosophical, with which Sir John has adorned his book; and the reader who has a taste for such information and amusement will find abundant gratification from the beginning to the end of the volume.

We do not wish, however, to represent this work as containing nothing but such stuff as we have quoted. There is in Spain, and in Spanish scenes and Spanish manners, so peculiar and romantic a character, that even Sir John Carr cannot degrade it to absolute flatnes; and sometimes, when he so far forgets himself as to tell just what he sees and no more, his relation is not uninteresting-but these are rare and involuntary occasions; and on the whole we do not know that we ever met a book of travels in which a good subject was so miserably spoiled by ignorance, and presumption.