ness so that we could have warranted ourselves, in that respect, as Mr. Field would a horse-out, energetically, went our foot into the air, as though we were bestowing a hearty kick upon our departed and discomfited tormentor. Few feelings, indeed, we are disposed to think, are of more common growth in the human breast than the desire to combat calamity bodily. Whether it be a debt we cannot pay, or a piece of calumny, or a fit of despondency, or any other mental malady and vexation, we long to have it substantially before us in an attitude of defiance, that we might throw ourselves upon it and grapple with it, and hurl it to the ground, beneath our feet. Yet rather, we apprehend, from a certain latent and ineradicable hope of victory against all disadvantage of odds—such as might have animated some unhappy gladiator or Christian martyr in his unmatched fight in the bloody arena against a Libyan lion or Hyrcanian tiger-than from any inherent appetence of battle; for cowards, doubtless, experience the feeling as often, and as vehemently, as brave men.

O Fortunati nimiùm sua si bona nôrint!

O happy race, we were continually exclaiming, so that ye did but know how happy ye are, who are blessed with uninterrupted health; and are astonished and think it a grevious injury to be laid up, though it be but for a day! A most trite and hackneyed reflection; yet which we will not, for that consideration, scruple to write down, and print -for a proverb itself, to our thinking, has all the vividness of novelty, when we do not merely repeat it by rote or by way of homely consolation to others, but when it rises from our heart to our lips, on the happening to ourselves of some occurrence similar, perchance, to that which originally gave rise to it; just as we never tire of bread and water, on fresh occasions of hunger and thirst, though we eat and drink of them every day. "Nihil est dictum," in these late days, "quod non sit dictum prius.' Every moral truth is as old as that is, only it may not be quite so

common.

We do not remember to have ever envied this beast for his strength, or that one for his speed, or a third for his impenetrable hide proof against every verminous assault, that enables him to graze tranquilly in the midst of musquitoes, and to sleep soundly in the midst of fleas. Some little jealousy we will plead guilty to, and disposition to quarrel with the order of things, when we have been groaning with an attack of indigestion, and the thought has come across our minds that a cowwhose food is so simple and monotonous, should be blessed by providence with four stomachs, while man, that would appear to require that provision of nature in so much greater a degree, is limited to one. And upon particular occasion, when we were trudging along one broiling day, on a

one

high road, and late for dinner, we heartily grudged a swallow its wings, as it skimmed insultingly by us, skating as it were through the air, cutting every sort of circumgyratory figure. But we do most sincerely, and that pretty constantly-for we have a crazy corporeal frame of our own-think the brute creation to be eminently fortunate in their exemption, to so great an extent, from any bodily ills of Nature's infliction, save that of age. That they should suffer rarely, and but little, in their minds, is reasonable enough, and only a counterbalancing comfort for their incapacity of intellectual felicity, and the higher satisfaction of the soul; but that they should be free-almost universally-from constitutional as well as from moral annoyances, is a long notch in their reckoning, and a serious pull against humankind. Our only consolation, against that thought-in a bad headache or a fit of gout or rheumatism-is this: that though we would delightedly change beings-pro illâ vice-with the cat on our hearth, or the dog in our kennel, we should shudder to think of changing with them entirely; even though that notion of ingenious Rorarius,* were true to the full extent-" Quod bruta animalia sæpe Ratione utantur meliùs Homine”—that beasts frequently employ their faculties, such as they are, in a more sensible way than human beings, which he exemplifics, among a thousand other instances, by that supreme folly of King Henry the Eighth, who summoned a dead man-Thomas à Becket to rise up and be tried for his life; or that other, and stranger, opinion of Sennert,† that the spiritual and understanding part of brutes

* A singularly-amusing book, containing more extraordinary anecdotes of animals than any in Buffon, Bingley, or Jesse; and deductions from them even more extraordinary still. We extract the passage referred to, as the work though common enough on the continent is scarce in England :-" Is qui nunc vivit, Henricus Angliæ Rex, aliam super uxorem ducendi libidine cæus, post innumeras paratas cædes, inter quas Roffensis & Morus, duo illa doctrinarum lumina extincta, duo illæ Catholicæ fidei firmissimæ columnæ eversæ; nonne Divi Thomæ Cantuariensis, cujus natalem diem celebrat Ecclesia, cadaver effossum, non sècus quam si viveret, citari et coram eum sisti fecit ?" book i., page 52. Rorarius-Jerome by name-Papal Legate at the Court of Naples, during the reign of Henry viii.; and-whatever he might have been, which we could never exactly satisfy ourselves about, in other parts of the book--was evidently in earnest here.

+ William Sennert, of Wittenburgh, a distinguished chymist, and metaphysician— that other name for a very useless mortal-of the seventeenth century. Bayle, who had attentively perused his writings-by no means the case invariably in books which he refers to, with that most witty and wide-reading scholar-has extracted some singular passages from them. One anecdote of Sennert, that would have mightily tickled Bayle had he known it, we have met with in Doctor Wittic, a contemporary English physician. "Sennert," says he, "that loved experiments as well as my lord Bacon himself, being of opinion that a hen might be brought to lay golden eggs, did feed one upon gold-leaf for many months; but I cannot hear that she laid any eggs differing from those of the rest of her kind."

was shaped out of the same exalted essence with our own, but with this great gulph of difference between the two-that in the one case it resembles a coin which is called in, and its existence put an end to, immediately upon the death of the monarch whose image and superscription it bears, whereas the souls of men may be likened to medals that are intended to endure for ever!

But we had other things to occupy and amuse us besides this one, the most pleasurable of all-the revelling and exulting in our new health. Our sunshine was not animal only-and of the spirits which flow from a vigorous body, and the blood running cheerfully through the veins-but also of the mind. There is not, we verily believe, a single town in England, though it be ever so in considerable and dull and unprepossessing at the first appearance, which does not contain, either in itself or its immediate vicinity, some object worthy of the attention of the traveller, so that he will only look about for it. Everywhere there is something to be seen in the way of art or nature; or more frequently, perhaps, than either, interesting historical association. We recollect, many years ago, having been detained for a couple of days, by a troublesome piece of business, which we could neither neglect nor discharge vicariously, at the little town of S, in Buckinghamshire; if that truly should be called a town which is a mere mile of high-road lined with commonplace houses, and whose only public building is a church. Yet even here, without an acquaintance, and as it happened from the suddenness of our journey without having provided ourselves with a single book, we were anything but dull and unoccupied. We were at no loss to shape out a pleasant pursuit for the employment of that portion of our time which was not otherwise and much less agreeably engaged. Several hours, on the first day, we spent in wandering about the town, first up this side and then up that, endeavouring to satisfy our minds in which particular house, or its predecessor upon the same site, the two young princes passed the night-those victims of Crookback's cruelty and ambition-on their melancholy journey to the tower, and their graves. And the next morning we were up betimes, and on our way to the village of Grafton, a league or so distant, to see if we could trace out any remains of the once stately mansion of the Woodvilles, which blithe King Edward rode over to from Sone fine summer morning, nearly four hundred years ago, and privately espoused the sleek widow Grey, the daughter of the Lord of Grafton.

and its neighbourhood had their two attractions; but here, in Lucerne, there were sights enough—with a wise economy of them, and the putting ourselves upon an allowance of pleasure-to last us for the ten days or thereabouts which we had designed to stay there. We say

economy of pleasures: for we have accustomed ourselves through life to deal with these as we do with our game, which we never wantonly and thriftlessly destroy in one great slaughtering unsatisfactory day, but husband it with so judicious an expenditure and the killing only exactly as much as we want, that it lasts us through the entire season; nor is the first of February without its share any more than the first of September. And a very charming and compensating thing it is for the sobriety and contentedness of such a disposition, that a wonderfully small stock of pleasures, and those of a very simple kind, will amply suffice a man through life, who will but make up his mind to give his whole heart and soul to one of them at a time, and thoroughly to exhaust that before he proceeds to another. For our own parts, we are proud to say it, the prospect of a new walk, or a new book, or a day's fishing in some untried brook or river-nay, even the likelihood, from the look of the evening, of a bright and warm day for the morrow-are quite enough to excite agreeable sensations in our breast. We think of them at night, when we go to bed, and they are present to our minds directly we awake.

Here, in Lucerne, there was many an interesting object, not all of them obvious at first and such as thrust themselves ostentatiously upon the notice of a stranger, but lying a little way off in the suburbs, or in odd nooks and corners of the streets, and requiring to be sought out; and the more enjoyable, for that very reason, as being the fruits of our proper discoveries. There was the pleasant walk of the Three Linden Trees, whence is obtained by far the most beautiful of the many beautiful views from various points of the town; with its crowded jostling houses, its long bridge over the rushing Reuss, as it darts away from the calm lake, Sonnenburgh and Schauensee in the distance, and close beneath us the slender spires of the ancient church of the Hof, and that solemn yet most lovely buryingground-with its succession of open arches, framing each of them a piece of the blue sky and snowy distant mountains-in whose bosom, were we to end our days here, we would entreat of the charity of our catholic brethren, the indulgence of a grave. Then there was that graceful line of old walls, as white and perfect as though they had been built but yesterday, environing the town, on the land side, in the shape of a bent bow, and springing up at every hundred yards into a tall castellated tower. These were the works of man; and they acted upon our minds very differently from a great and awful display of nature. Instead of stunning our imagination, they propelled it; and every story of their history or tradition, with which we had made ourselves acquainted, would come gliding across our memories like figures upon a sheeted wall, as we would stand, with folded arms, gazing by the hour together, upon those fresh

yet venerable remains of ages so long departed. Now it is the glorious perilous year 1332: and the whole country without the ramparts, where we are now standing, is crowded with armed men, over whose heads, as they march to the assault, wave the black and blue standards of Argovy and the green and white ones of Thurgovy. The scaling-ladders are laid against the walls; the sky is darkened with arrows; the air rings with blows, and oaths, and loud war-cries, with the shrieks of the wounded and dying, and the savage shouts of triumph and vengeance. Now it is the eve of the Annunciation, and a procession of peaceful monks is winding its way, with hymns and fragrant censers, to the church of Blessed Mary of the Snow, to return thanks to the Almighty, that mercifully bade the wind to shift on the occasion of the great conflagration of 1340. Famous too was that fire, for an instance of man's kindliness of spirit and noble forgetfulness of ancient grievances, as well as of the Divine mercy. The peasants of Unterwalden, seeing the flames blazing from afar, hurried across the lake, in numerous boats, to the assistance of the men of Lucerne. Now there had long raged a bitter feud between the inhabitants of the two cantons, growing out of a disputed right of the pasturage on the mountains that divided them; and the men of Lucerne, distrusting the intentions of so large a body of men, drew up in a line on the shore, prepared to oppose their landing. The brave peasants, filled with grief that they should be suspected of such an unworthy purpose as the endeavouring to take advantage of the calamity which had befallen their neighbours, called out, with tears in their eyes, "Dear friends and fellowcountrymen! we come but to succour you in your great danger; to help to save you and your wives, and your children, and your goods, in this great visitation wherewith it has pleased Heaven to afflict you." Touched at once, and ashamed of their ungenerous suspicions, the citizens gratefully accepted their assistance. Their joint exertions, favoured as they were, at that very moment, by a providential change in the wind, succeeded, eventually, in extinguishing the flames, though not before they had burnt down a large part of the town. And it is a pleasant thing to be able to add, that all their differences were speedily arranged, and that a warm friendship, from that day forward down to the present time, has continued to unite the two cantons.

(To be continued.)