beds of roses!! a well swept gravel walk!!! and a seat under a magnificent plane tree, beneath the shade of which, love, literature, and laziness are enjoyed in blessed unconsciousness of the brick and mortar Tempé, by which they are surrounded!!!! And all this in the matter-of-fact year of 1834. Oh, George Robins, if Piccadilly ever have the honour of being entrusted to your hammer and eloquence, charge the eminent individual who does your fine writing to look upon the locality with the eye of Alexander Dumas, who, on turning out of St. James's-street, saw this petite maison bien simple et bien isolée, somewhere about the solitary purlieus of the romantic "White Horse," or in the picturesque and uninhabited wilderness tenanted by the "Black Bear!"

Is it too much presumption to affirm positively that no English author, treating of French localities, ever committed a blunder that can be compared with this, in unmitigated and superlative absurdity? When the celebrated town-councillor of Leeds ingeniously contrived to spell coffee without employing a single letter that is to be found in the original word, his ka wphy bore as little resemblance to the aromabearing original, as does the Piccadilly of Dumas to the reality which we daily perambulate. He has crowded that already well-possessed locality with suburban villas and highway-side retreats; and in this scene he has placed his lovers, like delighted citizens in a Holloway villa; and the amiable exiles look out, with minds serene, upon the rusticities of the rural district, watched and guarded by the police shepherds of St. George and St. James. Why this would scarcely have been tolerable had the action been laid three or four centuries ago, when, "as yet, black breeches were not ;" and yet so deliciously absurd is it, that to alter it, would be like taking the last line from an epigram-it would be like throwing away the sweet part of the orange for the sake of the candied peel; and besides, touching seldom improves anything. We all know what came of Alexander the Great's nose when Augustus Cæsar laid his finger on it.

But, after all, it must in justice be confessed that some of our own travellers, journeying in foreign countries, do occasionally see objects in a very strange light, as well as reason upon matters starting from wrong premises. Mrs. Trollope is one of these. Such of our readers as have visited Prague may recollect that where St. John Neopomuk was flung from the bridge there into the Moldau, the parapet is marked by seven brass stars. The saint suffered this species of martyrdom for refusing to reveal to the Emperor Wenceslaus what the empress (a princess of Bavaria) had imparted to him under the seal of

confession. He is reported to have lain some centuries undiscovered in the sacred stream, and to have been perfectly uncorrupted when taken out. The body, thus found through the miraculous shining, day and night, of seven stars in the firmament exactly over the spot in which it lay in the bed of the river, may still be seen in the cathedral of St. Vitus, reclining in a crystal coffin within a shrine of solid silver, upheld by silver angels, guarded by silver sentinels, and covered by a lofty silken canopy, the corners of which are upheld by solid silver genii. Well, this saint, who so died, and who is thus enshrined, has, by a peculiar process of Roman hagiofacture, become the recognized patron saint of highways and bridges, but especially of the latter :

Da wurden Brucken aufgeführt

Und Lepomuken D’rauf postirt.

No one can have travelled through Germany without seeing the venerable figure of a saint, in wood, stone, or humble clay, standing erect on one of its parapets, making the ground holy and the path safe about him. Mrs. Trollope has performed the grand tour and seen these figures; but, too ignorant to know, or too idle to ask their meaning, she gravely informs her readers that the Germans so loved the Jesuits that they have even raised statues in their honour upon the way-sides and bridge parapets; and she really takes the canonized Neopomuk, guardian of travellers by flood and fell, for a counterfeit presentment of a son of Loyola testifying to the gratitude of the people who put him there. Düller's three pennyworth of useful information on "Jesuitien " might have taught better things to the voyageuse of Paternoster-row.

Again, some of our readers may recollect, near Baden-Baden, the convent of Lichtenthal, the glory of whose ancient days is departed, but whose beauty has been but slightly ruffled by the hand of inexorable Time. This convent lies in a snug elbow of land, under the shade of an overhanging cliff; it is so embosomed and embowered that it is invisible to the traveller till he is close upon it. How will our readers suppose that a tourist by profession (one who, it would be imagined, was particularly sharp-sighted) describes the position of this lowly, halfhidden convent? Leigh Ritchie, the writer to whom we allude, actually describes it as perched upon the summit of a rock : and he likens it to a Tyrolean castle reared on some wild craig! Surely, when Mr. Ritchie examined this castle, he must have stood upon his head to view it.

But it is time that we should turn to the Marquis de Custine, whose example we have indeed followed by prefacing our

observations on Russia by an introduction not exactly germane to the matter. He has given an introductory prologue to "Travels in Muscovy," by reciting some very startling and admirably-drawn scenes from the French revolution-a revolution which gave his gallant father and grandfather to the scaffold, which inflicted adversity and suffering upon his excellent mother, and which has had its influences, and deep ones too, upon his own disposition and character. We have little hesitation in giving credence to all he imparts to us connected with the above troubled and historical period; but when we arrive with him on a foreign shore, we do not think it so safe to follow implicitly all his impressions of travel. He advances a great deal upon which we should be sorry to depend; but, in spite of his numerous contradictions, we can extract much that is undoubtedly real, important, and instructive. We have been particularly struck with one circumstance in his scattered notices of Russian society-that Russia has no middle class, the division not being merely a vast aristocracy and a vast world of slavery, but, with greater truth, one lord, master of soul and body, and one huge class of slaves of various degree, whose will is not theirs, whose breath is not their own, whose lives, thoughts, and possessions are the property of the brilliant despot who rules, scourges, and smiles upon them.

It is the fashion in Russia to imitate times that are called classical; and it may be imagined that the divisions of society are derived from a heathen but popular model, but this can hardly be the case. Russia, we must confess, has no middle class, and it has often been asserted that there was no middle class among the ancients; but there is a great error in this, as there frequently is in an oft-repeated assertion-society with the latter was divided into the positive slave and his superlative master, and so far the assertion is correct enough; but there was a true middle class, nevertheless, which was to be found among the educated and intellectual portion of the slaves; and if we draw a comparison between that part of ancient society with its corresponding section in modern times, it will be no doubtful matter to determine which may lay claim to the greater degree of eminence. The middle classes of our own days, considering the education which is given them, and the intellect which they may almost purchase, have produced very few men whom posterity will acknowledge; while we, who are the posterity of by-gone ages, recognize the glorious names which made their own and all succeeding times harmonious, although their owners sang while the collar of slavery choked their very utterance. The mediocrity of rank in these individuals found

no corresponding humbleness of ability attending it. Of this rank, or rather of these men of no rank, were Andronicus, the inventor of dramatic poetry; Plautus, the witty but coarse play writer and Jack of all trades-he was the poetized Wycherley of his day; while Terence, who was not only a slave, but a negro slave, became the model of genteel comedy, was the Congreve of his epoch, dined out daily in the Belgrave-square of the Everlasting City, and, like Beaumarchais, unscrupulously stole a good plot, or a good thing, whenever he found either, lying about wanting an owner. Æsop, the fabulist; Phædrus, his imitator; and the moral philosopher Epictetus, who was as low in condition, even in his degree of bondman, as he was exalted in his character of a teacher of mankind, were all slaves; the latter, moreover, was the slave of one who had been himself a slave-a depth of degradation than which there can be none deeper; but Epictetus was an instrument of God, used to prepare men's minds for a change from the vices of Paganism to the virtues of Christianity; his writings being the stepping-stones between the two extremes, admirably calculated to enable the heathen to take a nearer review of the newly-revealed truth, and, having made the one step from infidelity, to induce them rather to make the second in advance to Christ, than to turn again to the dazzling unintelligibilities of the Capitoline Jove.

From slavery, if we direct our attention to mere poverty, the next condition to it, we shall see that the poor men characteristically paid their addresses to poetry: ut solent pauperes. Such was Horace, who, if not in want, was of inferior descent, his grandfather having been a slave, and, subsequently to receiving the freedom-giving box on the ear from the prætor, a tax-gatherer. Virgil was of equally mean descent, by his father's side, although he derived some portion of nobility from his mother. Juvenal, too, was not only poor and a poet, a condition to make a slave despise him, but he was a very angry poet into the bargain; and in equal proportion as he was poor, angry, and satirical, in poetry, was Lucian poor, angry, and satirical, in prose; the latter made an indifferent statuary, but he was an excellent contributor to such of the periodicals of his day as required articles of a very high and peppery nature. If the poets were poor, the philosophers were scarcely more celebrated for being troubled with any particular onerous portion of wealth; and thus we see the proudest walks of philosophy illustrated by Demosthenes, the blacksmith; Socrates, the ill-featured offspring of a mason and a midwife; Epicurus, rich only in his boast of haying descended

from Ajax; and Isocrates, whose father manufactured the musical ancestry from which are derived the piano and fiddle families of our philharmonic days. There is a host of remaining philosophers, who, from the obscurity which envelopes them, belonged probably to the same unblessed class; we can only speak with certainty of the historian Quintus Curtius, who was of an ignoble family; of the medical writer Celsus, who was most assuredly no Roman citizen, though resident at Rome; and of Plutarch, whose family, however, was respectable, though history does not inform us whether his father kept a gig.

But though art and science, with the nine sisters who make Parnassus vocal, were thus worshipped by the slave, and his cousin the beggar, wealth was by no means a synonymous term for either sloth or incapacity. The aristocracy of the purse, as well as that of birth, joined with the democracy of mere talent and few denarii, in many a pleasant pic-nic to the shades of Helicon and the margin of the Hippocrene. The opulent Lucretius, who believed nothing; the rich and modest Persius; the two Plinys-the soul of one of whom, in its letterwriting capacity, entered into Horace Walpole; the soft and knightly Tibullus, a sort of Latin Sir Philip Sidney; the profligate Sophocles; Eschylus, whom, had he lived now, the spread of Temperance Societies would have driven mad; and, third of the inspired three, their brother dramatist Euripides— all these, cum multis aliis, mounted their pegasus with gold spurs; some, like Martial, got their mouths filled with the sugar-candy of imperial recompense, while others were nearly allied to sovereignty itself, the sires of Cicero having been Sabian kings. The broad-shouldered Plato united, in his own person, the two degrees of which we have been speaking, for, in spite of the great nobility of his family, he experienced all the horrors of slavery; the liberality of his friends redeemed him from his sufferings at the cost of three thousand drachmæ; and in this he was more fortunate than his brother slave Diogenes, who, being friendless, was left to hug his irons and teach his master's sons to be virtuous and free.

This is, perhaps, a digression, but it is one, we hope, not devoid of interest. Its connection with Russia is in this much, that the latter country, forming everything upon a classical model, can produce nothing of a classical quality. The slavery of Muscovy will never engender either a Terence or an Æsop. The truth is, that the natural characters of the modern Russ and the ancient Roman are not less unlike than the quality of their climates. The education of the two stand as the anti