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cally explain the intellectual habits of Evelyn, and furnish a useful suggestion for augmenting the pleasures of persons resident in the country. It is not sufficient to be a sportsman or a fariner. These avocations are only connected with the kitchen-garden of the mind; they have nothing to do with its park or shrubbery. They may gratify the necessity for action, a necessity as powerful as that for eating, but they do not make it plea surable also. In short, it is obvious that innocent enjoyments cannot be too much multiplied under rural residence; and that musick, books, draw-, ing, landscape-gardening, and planting, are essential ingredients of felicity in the situation described.

Such a man was Evelyn,-a man who, in the words of our Author, was a perfect model of what an English gentleman should be; a man whose whole life was devoted to the advancement of those arts which have been the source of the wealth, greatness, and prosperity of his country. Pref. xxiij.

The first article of this volume is a Tract on Liberty and Servitude, translated from the French of La Mothe le Vayer, a crafty rogue, who finding his Vertu des Payens drop dead from the press, procured a Government order for its suppression, in consequence of which manoeuvre the whole edition was rapidly sold. P. 3.

We were startled, not being inclined to think a Frenchman's idea of liberty sound law on the subject; but this fox confines himself to philosophical liberty, freedom from the tyranny of passions and appetites, and wisely considers, concerning the political sort, that "Louis the Just is such a Prince, that there is no imagining liberty which can possibly be so sweet and advantageons unto us, as the obedience rendered to him. (p. 36.) La Mothe la Vayer was called the French Plutarch, and assuredly this tract is an admirable imitation of one of that Greek's essays. The second Essay is, "The state of France as it stood in the ninth year of this present Lewis the XIII. This tract is headed by a preface, in which it is observed, concerning foreign travel, that a man derives no benefit from it who passes through a country “like a goose swimming down a river" (p. 46), acquires only the language, "a parrot virtue," the "shell only of

[Nov.

the kernel," or counts steeples; but he who in foreign manners sees things which may improve his own, “especially in point of drink and tobacco, which are our Northern, national, and most sordid of vices." (p. 46.) The truth is, that men travel for education at an age when they are least qualified and inclined to indulge in ethical, philosophical, and political studies; and if they travel in more mature years, it is either for business, or to little purpose in ethics, unless they have lived among the people: for some time, and then it is too often only the miserable drudgery of unlearning what is good and best. We really think the advantages of travel, as to political and moral good, to be merely the Hibernian gain of a loss; for "Frenchified and Italianized Englishmen" are not those from whom their country derives benefit. Besides, there is nothing in which Mind is of more consequence, than in Travel. A fool brings back only snuff-boxes and cigars, and remembers nothing more than his refreshments, accommodations, and adventures, in his peregrinations. He brings home no improvements in commerce, the conveniences of life, and the arts. Sir Rich. Sutton brought to England clover and the locks of canals; and a philosophical Frenchman would take home from England the steam-engine.

From this preface we proceed to Evelyn's "Account of the state of France, at the period in question." He begins with a Court Calendar of the titles of the Royal Family, from which we learn (inter alia) that the Salic law, or bar to the succession of females, was only a piece of Court legerdermain, to elude and invalidate the title of our former and ancient Kings of England, as to succession in the right of their mothers and wives." (p. 54.) By this the French have unintentionally rendered us the most valuable of services, for had our Monarchs succeeded to the throne in question, Paris would have been the Metropolis, and England become only a province. He next gives us the cha racters of the Royal Family in flattering colours, and then adjoins the French opinions of Royal illegitimates, &c. in the following words :

"Touching the natural issue of the Kings of France (who are ever in this kind country in very great reputation and place,

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suitable to their birth Date King had any them since. A jewel this of too great value;

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tions are little considerable, as not daring to be brewing and hatching such factions, as where the gentry and civiller sort of mankind are universally given to solitary and unactive lives in the country. Besides, the gentlemen are generally given to those laudable magnificencies of building and furnishing their palaces with the most precious moveables, much of the luxe and excesse of Italy, being now far entred amongst them, as may well serve to exemplifie, when in the Dutchess of Chaulmes her palace neer the Place Royal in Paris, the pennaches or tufts of plumes belonging to one of her beds only,

are estimated worth fourteen thousand livers, which amount to neer a thousand pounds sterling of our money.

"Every great person who builds here, however qualified with intellectuals, pretends to his elaboratory and library, for the furnishing of which last he doth not much amuse himself in the particular elections of either authors or impressions; but having erected his cases and measured them, aecords with a stationer to furnish him with so many gilded folios, so many yards of quartos and octavos, by the great, till his bibliotheke be full of volumes. And yet some of them both have excellent books, and are very polite scholars; but the noblesse do not naturally so addict themselves to studie as the gownmen do; accounting it a life so contemplative and below their spifits, that no gentleman's necessity whatsoever shall easily engage him to seek any support either by Physick or Law; both which professions are (as in truth they highly merit) in very laudable esteem and reputation amongst us in Englaud." PP.

81, 82.

Cleanliness is the concomitant of industry; but Evelyn very justly also attributes dirty habits to the custom of living in lodgings; and we know that at Edinburgh the people so live in what they call flats or stories, and that there is an old joke among these our gallant and able fellow countrymen, That nae good comes of cleanliness."

Most of the houses [at Paris] ordinarily harbour six or often ten families betwixt heaven and hell, the garrets and the cellars; and this I take to be the true cause of that nastinesse which we usually impute to the nation: persons of quality, and such as have room enough, being far more proper and sumptuous in their houses then the best of us here in England, however we arrogate the contrary." P.93.

The French mode of living is certainly very uncomfortable to an Englishman. Brick floors without carpets, and people eternally (in colloquial language) bobbing in and out,

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take away all interest in cleanliness, because, under the circumstances, as impracticable as in a counting-house or public office. Under this situation of living, as at an inn, with no feelings of home, and no furniture that we fear to spoil, trouble squats like the night-mare upon cleanliness, and paralyzes all her limbs.

Mr. Evelyn makes the following comparison between London and Paris:

it hath been and still is a great controversie "Touching the extent of this city [Paris], amongst our countreymen travellers, which is the larger, this or London; every one the figures of them both are so different, speaks according to his inclinations; but that it would be a very difficult matter to reconcile them, by making an exact tryall: there is as yet no very great inequality: but and, peradventure, all things considered, if we may conjecture from the buildings at present, and prodigious enlargements of their suburbs on all sides, what a little time and peace will render it, it must without doubt in a short time outgrow the contention and far exceed it: for I finde no end of their erecting not onely of particular houses, but even of whole streets, and those so incomparably fair and uniform, that you lian opera, where the diversity of scenes surwould imagine yourself rather in some Itaprise the beholder, then beleeve yourself to be in a reall citie. This is onely to be obthat the best fabricks commonly promise served in their prime buildings and palaces, less towards the front or streets than you will finde them within the court; which is caused by the high walls and tarraces that thwart them; a piece of modestie which in other appearances and outsides they do not usually practise.

"But what our city of London hath not in houses and palaces, she hath in shops and taverns; which render it so open by day, and cheerfull in the night, that it apthe beholder; for so mad and lowd a town pears to be a perpetuall wake or wedding to is no where to be found in the whole world."”

P. 94.

Hence, perhaps, was originally derived the French insult of "a nation of shopkeepers."

The next extracts which we shall make are from a Character of England by a French Protestant, in the Commonwealth æra. Evelyn was much offended with it; but though an illnatured essay, it nevertheless contains facts upon which a foreigner might be supposed to put illiberal constructions.

The traveller, upon his arrival at Dover, was "entertained by the people of the town with suspicious and forbidding

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forbidding countenances, whispering, and stiff postures. (p. 149.) When he had taken post, and was scarce out of the village, he was amazed at the acclamations of the boys "running after and affrighting the horses, hooting and crying out, French dogs, French dogs, a Mounser, a Mounser!" (ibid.) And when he arrived at Rochester, "it appeared a new thing to him that his confident host set him down cheek by joul by him, belching and puffing tobacco in his face, though he afterwards found it to be the usual stile of this country, and that the gentlemen who lodged at their inns entertained themselves in their company, and were much pleased at their impertinences." P. 150.

This tract was written in 1659, and the blessed effects of liberty and equality are thus exhibited :

Arrived at the Metropolis of civility, London, we put ourselves in coach with some persons of quality who came to conduct us to our lodging; but neither was this passage without honour done to us; the kennel dirt, squibs, roots, and rams' hornes, being favours which were frequently cast at us by the children and apprentices without reproofe; civilities than in Paris a gentleman as seldom meets withall, as with the contests of carmen, who in this town. do domineer in the streets, o'erthrow the hell-carts (for so they name the coaches), cursing and reviling at the nobles; you would imagine yourself amongst a legion of devils and in the suburbs of hell. I have greatly wondered at the remissness of the Magistrate, and the temper of the gentle men, and that the citizens who subsist onely upon them, should permit so great a disorder, rather joyning in the affronts then at all chastizing the inhumanity. But these are the natural effects of parity, popular libertinism, and insulary manners." P.150. The situation of London he admires, but says that the town itself consists of a wooden, Northern, and inartificial congestion of houses, and the principal streets narrow; the Banqueting House at Whitehall “built about and converted into raskally warehouses; the Churches made jakes and stables, markets and tippling houses" (p. 151); the congregations at the Meetings setting with their hats on, when the Psalms were read, and bare-headed when they were sung; insipid, tedious, and unmethodical prayers; sermons of speculative and abstracted notions and things, which not the people nor preachers themselves understood. P.

152.

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"The minister uses no habit of distinction or gravity, but steps up in guerpo; and when he laies by his cloak (as I have observed some of them), he has the action rather of a thrasher than a divine. This they call taking pains, and indeed it is so to those that hear them; but thus they have now encouraged every pert mechanick to invade, affront, and out-preach them; and having uncancelled all manner of decency, prostituted both their persons and function to usurpation, penury, and derision. You may well imagine by the manners of the people, and their prodigious opinions, that there is no catechism nor sacraments duely administered: the religion of England is preaching and sitting still on Sundaies." P.153,

Our author next declaims against ritual disdain, incharity, and imposthe tyranny, ambition, ignorance, spiture, which thus "deformed the oncerenowned Church of England" (pp. 155, 156); and then proceeds again to the buildings. If he says a whole street of this wooden city were burnt down, the Magistrate had either no power nor care to make them build with any uniformity, and thus it happened, that London, "though a large was yet a very ugly town, pestred with hackney coaches and insolent carremen, shops and taverns, noyse, and such a cloud of sea-coal, as if there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is this volcano in a foggy day."P. 157.

He next proceeds to the prodigious number of houses, where they sold a certain drink called ale, a muddy kind of beverage, in drinking which, and smoking tobacco, gentlemen spent much of their time (p. 157); though others frequented taverns, where they drank Spanish wines, and other sophisticated liquors, to fury and intemperance (p. 157); and to these taverns transferred the organs out of their churches, singing to them Bacchanalian dithrambicks. (p. 158.) Ladies of the greatest quality suffered themselves to be treated in these taverns as if they were courtezans, drank their crowned cups (bumpers) roundly, danced after the fiddle, and kissed freely. [Lord Clarendon mentions this practice in his own Life.] Drinking healths (a very rare thing in France) to every one at the table, made, he says, the whole company ready to fall asleep before the cloth was removed; the females, he adds, boasted of making all advantages at

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play; and then, like a true Frenchinan, he says,