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who like sugary wines, who prefer sweet | the combinations of colour and form and perport to the most velvety claret, and very sweet champagne to very dry.

fume which nature presents in such endless variety. Besides, it cannot be admitted that a man only puts into a landscape what was in himself before. It may be so, if he only looks and then looks away again; if he surveys the scene for five minutes or half an hour, and then forthwith passes on to his concerns, or to the next view put down in the programme of the guide-book. But this is to do justice neither to the scenery nor to himself. To realize the true enjoyment and instruction of landscape one must brood over it, placing oneself passively and often in the midst of it, as the landscape itself seems to shimmer passively under the noonday sun. You must learn the moods of your landscape and watch its transformations, and in time it becomes as good and profitable as a friend when face answereth to face.

It may be said that a passion for inanimate scenery, for heath and hill and long stretching down with the sea at its feet, may well engender some coolness towards a man's fellows, and that in acquiring a love for the stillness, the subtle responsiveness, and the beauty of nature, one grows somewhat fastidious in the face of the turmoil and distraction, the uproar and seeming vulgarity, of ordinary human life. Contrasted with the steadfastness of nature here, the existence of the crowd wears a look of meanness, as of straws and dust

Anybody of full sensibility will like the mountains and the vast views as much as his neighbours or more, but then he has an eye for ever so much besides which is to them insipid, wearisome, or even disgusting. A wide heathy down, for example, they find monotonous, unsuggestive, and absolutely ugly. They will prefer an honest Essex landscape, with no rise and fall to speak of, but fat and green, rich with promise of corn and mutton, and redolent of good augury for the markets. This is at least something which recalls mankind. The wild and barren heath recalls nothing to them, suggests nothing save a mean and profitless desolation. They do not care for, because they hardly notice, its manifold fragrance under the hot midday sun, or in the fresh south-west wind; they forget to watch its changes of shade and colour, from grey in the morning to brown at noon, and from brown to purple at evening, with its intermittent hours and days of deepest black. Yet, to one who studies his landscape as a critic studies the picture of it, all this and much more discloses itself. He can collect, too, an anthology of evergrowing moral impressions and images, such as more than anything else but the full play of his social affections enrich the character of a man. And so in other points where the un-blown hither and thither by horrid winds. trained mind finds all barren and unpleasing. A man with the requisite sense sees as many things and has as much delight in a grassy bottom with the hawthorn showing here and there, or in a dell studded with yew and wild juniper, as one with less impressionable soul experiences amongst Italian lakes or at Sorrento. It may be said that this difference of susceptibility arises from original and irremovable differences of subjective quality; that men only transfer into landscapes, as into symphonies and sonatas, what was in their own minds; that the landscape is only the instrument and stimulus which sets all this a-working within. Of course this may be true enough as far as it goes. There are as many internal differences in the minds of men as there are among landscapes, but then these differences are capable of illimitable modification, and the habit of a nice and accurate analysis of the impressions which scenery makes on one is, or may be made, a peculiarly effective agent in this process. It will not make men more alike, except in making them all more able to extract a measure of inspiration, more or less, higher or lower, from all

After all, however, what is this but to say that, because you love Turner and Gainsborough, you shall detest your Hogarth? It is true that in Wordsworth one may detect some tendency of this kind. The absorption in which external nature held him engendered an air of coldness, if not quite of apathy, about the accidents of humanity. He certainly never cared as much about men as he did about mountains; never was as deeply stirred by thoughts of the one as of the other; did not find in the former the stimulus to sympathy and expansion which he found in the latter. Wordsworth's nature, however, was exceptional in this respect, as it was in amount of genius. In the majority of men with any pretence to a fine moral temper there is an instinctive effusion of feeling for their own kind. The study and companionship of external beauty ought to strengthen rather than weaken this. The pitilessness of nature, displayed just as much in her beauty and calm as in her storm and fury, is the fact which above all others inspires pity and sense of fellowship, by convincing us that men are in the presence of forces which are absolutely indifferent to

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their sufferings and endeavours. Perhaps leaving the children to guess why such an no one furnishes so striking an example of unintelligent process has been performed in this order of sentiment as Victor Hugo. any given instance. We should deprive Nobody is so sensible as he of the ruthless- ourselves of the pleasantest of all rights, ness of nature even while she smiles, and the right to quote. It is true that when we nobody is so alive as he is to the miseries enter into the details of Mr. Eastwick's of man, and to the fact that our only re- work, we are bound to point out one or two source is humane union and constant mu- faults of construction. We cannot altotual helpfulness. He perhaps has dwelt gether pass over the strange composition of more strongly than is altogether wholesome the book, made up as it is of the painful exupon the impassive serenity of nature. perience of the Financial Commissioner for This is not her only side. If she sometimes the General Credit Company, of the quick derides you by looking her loveliest when observation and acute remarks of the real you are plunged in bitterness, let it be said Mr. Eastwick, and of the imaginary advenalso that by and by her steadfastness and tures of some one rather like Mr. Eastwick permanence of relation begin to restore a who was settled at Valencia and had read serenity which is of the highest kind because Lever's novels. The financial part of the it is the least narrowly egotistic. There book is too dry and documentary. Some are, no doubt, two sorts of men -one of the lighter sketches are too fanciful. whom external nature in beauty or in horror more judicious mixture of the several parts most keenly touches, and the other whose of the book might have excluded the Irish spmpathies are most directly reached and major, who seems to have desired to perpetmost generously stirred by the drama of uate Sir Lucius O'Trigger among the Spanbusy human life. There are men who love ish South Americans. But an authentic their kind in the abstract, but flee from record of what Mr. Eastwick did, fused up them in the concrete; there are others to completely with pictures of what he saw, whom nature is cold and unsuggestive and would have made the Loan of 1864 memoinhospitable. You have Wordsworth, and rable in the history of letters, and would alyou have Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb, most have consoled the bondholders for rewho loves the tide of life that flows at Char- pudiation. They will now have the pleasure of thinking that their Commissioner has brought Venezuela to Europe, and that owing to their loss we have seen as with our own eyes the harbours of St. Thomas and La Guaira, the towns of Carácas and Valencia. Yet, perhaps, so great is the perversity of human and of investing nature, these sketches will seem dearly bought. No such sentence could have been passed on the book which, judging from the one now before us, we say Mr. Eastwick might and ought to have written.

ing Cross. Perhaps it goes without saying

that the best and happiest man is he who unites in himself a particle of either temperament who is content or glad to be alone with the external world, and is not too fastidious nor too loftily cloudy to enjoy the life and spectacle of the crowd.

From The Spectator.

MR. EASTWICK'S VENEZUELA.*

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THE reviewer's task is pleasant indeed when he has nothing more to do than to read such a book as this, and give the public a general idea of its contents. All he can say is, Read, for I have read it; approve, for I have approved it." Of course the public has so much confidence in its chosen critics as will authorize it to act on such a statement. But after all, there would be something meagre and unsatisfactory in the look of our columns if we made no more use of Mr. Eastwick's admirable sketches. We should be too much like those representative parents who are always being described as placing books in the hands of their children, and apparently

Venezuela; or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic, with the History of the Loan of 1864.

By Edward B. Eastwick, C.B., F. R. S.
Map. London: Chapman and Hall. 1868.

With a

The drive

Beginning with the voyage out, Mr. Eastwick gives a dreary sketch of St. Thomas. He calls it the nest of yellow fever, difficult and dangerous of access, swarming with sharks, fearfully depressing, and wholly destitute of fresh water. out of the town leads past the cemeteries of all religions. Apparently the only amusement to be had is a shark hunt. Mr. Eastwick and a friend rowed to the mouth of the harbour towing a dead horse at the stern of the boat. No back fins were visible, but, when the rowers were checked for a moment, several dark lines were seen just astern of the horse, and the instant the boat stopped five monstrous sharks darted at the carcass. Four bullets through the nearest shark and a harpoon driven into it just under the lower jaw disposed of it at once, and when it was towed to the beach

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it was found to measure more than sixteen | I was a guest, the gentleman who cleaned the feet in length by nearly six feet in circum- boots always came into my room with his hat on ference. The other sharks had pulled the and a cigar in his mouth; and another gentlehorse under water," and we could only tell man whom I had engaged to assist Juan, left me by the bubbles and bloody foam what a the day after his arrival, on being refused the worry was going on below." If the choice custody of my keys and purse, which he canof such a place as St. Thomas for a mail didly stated was the only duty he felt equal to. station perplexed Mr. Eastwick, he was At dances, as soon as the music strikes up in the still more astonished at the open roadstead drawing-room, the servants begin to waltz in the of La Guaira being the port for the capital are almost always on the ground floor, and generpassages and ante-rooms, and as entertainments of Venezuela. The place is picturesque ally in rooms looking into the streets, the great when viewed from the sea, but there is no unwashed' thrust their naked arms and greasy shelter for shipping, and the town is consid- faces between the bars of the windows and critered the hottest in the world. Perhaps icize the dancing with much spirit. I have seen the best way of conveying to a European a gentleman in rags leaning into a window from an idea of the heat, is to say that the mean the streets with his bare arms almost touching temperature in the coldest month is four de- those of a beautifully dressed lady, while his grees of centigrade higher than that of the most sweet breath fanned her tresses. On anhottest month in Paris. If it be added that other occasion I was talking to some ladies at an there are no appliances whatever to make evening party, when a worthy sansculotte jerked things bearable -no good houses, no ice, in his head so suddenly to listen to our converno cold water, no shade, and no breeze sation, that I stopped, on which he called out, it will be possible to arrive at a faint notion won't talk to any one but their own set!' Oh, these are the aristocrats we have here, who of the reality." The temperature of Mr. Eastwick's book is throughout that of the president of one of the States, half-a-dozen my sitting down to play chess with the wife of Dante's Inferno. We must add that the female servants, of every shade, from tawny twidescriptions are equally vivid. The pictures light to black night, surrounded the table and of the bridle road from La Guaira to Car- began to watch the game." ácas, of the town of Carácas itself, of the town and neighbourhood of Valencia, and of the general configuration of the country, may be cited as specimens of Mr. Eastwick's art. But we shall find better things to quote when we come to the manners and customs of the people.

The republican equality that prevails everywhere except among the sentries impressed Mr. Eastwick more strongly than favourably. The whole nature of the Venezuelans, he says, is soured as soon as they put on a red uniform. Yet a negro who acts as a sort of permanent official of a lower grade at the Government House in Caracas was allowed to say very sharp things to his superiors. He was once on the balcony with a general, when some students began to utter seditious cries, and exclaim, "Down with the negroes! Down with the brigands!" The General asked his companion sneeringly if he heard what was said about him. Your excellency," he replied, "I hear. They are calling out Down with the negroes!' meaning, of course, me; and 'Down with the brigands!' which, as no one else is present, must refer, I suppose, to your excellency." Of the general freedom of manners which prevails among the servants Mr. Eastwick gives the following sketch:

"The doctrine of perfect equality is so well carried out that, in one of the best houses where

On

One of the least agreeable features of Venezuelan society is that lunatics are suffered to go about freely. No one ever heard of their doing any harm. One indeed came into a room in the middle of a dinner party, walked round the table murmuring broken sentences, and finally took up a knife from the sideboard. In another minute he had cut himself rather severely, the blood was trickling from his wrist, he was muttering faster than ever, and his eyes glittered like sparks. Fortunately, one of the company had the presence of mind to fill a glass of wine and offer it to the madman, or the Venezuelan experience of the harmlessness of such people would have been unpleasantly contradicted. Apropos of dinners, Mr. Eastwick gives the bill of fare of an entertainment offered to him by the Minister of Public Works. The order of the meal was:- "A brimming plateful of turtle soup, good in quality, and indifferently cooked; a large fruit of the custardapple genus; prawns, párga fish, and oysters; several fruits of the cactus; turkey, boned, and the inside filled with a kind of stuffing redolent of garlic; a plate of cherries; a fricandeau of some unknown meat; several slices of pine-apple; a dish, name unknown, the chief ingredient being the flesh of the land tortoise; grapes of various kinds; and an infinite series of other trifles." In this repast there was not as much garlic

AMERICA.

as usual. Mr. Eastwick tells of a friend | soldiers as a guard of honour. Every now and who was so sick of constant garlic that he at last resolved to live on eggs. He found to his horror that the small end of each egg was perforated, and some of the national condiment infused into it.

Mr. Eastwick is in most respects an enthusiastic admirer of the Venezuelan ladies. They are too refined to go to bull-fights, so that Mr. Burgess could not lay them under contribution for a South American "Bravo, toro!" But it is as well that magnificent faces should not be associated with the passion of cruelty, and the Venezuelans are to be seen at their windows, in the streets, or at the churches. Here is one of the scenes which ought to have made amends for any amount of heat and garlic:

then the host is elevated, and down go the people on their knees, and anon guns and rockets are discharged, and the use even of squibs and crackers is sanctified on such occasions."

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In other places, too, Mr. Eastwick is not a little tantalizing with his praises of the Creole beauties. His imaginative sketches warm with black eyes, profuse locks, rosy whiteness. Thinking that it was Mr. Eastcheeks, oval faces, and teeth of dazzling wick himself who was asked by a bewildering beauty whether he was married, and who replied with embarrassment Credit Company, and felt for the feelings sometimes," we blushed for the credit of the General of Messrs. Baxter, Rose, and Norton. But we soon found out our error, and saw that the Financial Commissioner had not been betrayed into any such indiscretions. The Company may safely send him out again whenever there are loans to be negotiated, and if the result of a second mission is at all like that of the first, the sooner Mr. Eastwick carries out another box of gold the better for English readers.

From The Saturday Review, 8 Aug.
AMERICA.

"The Catholic year at Caracas is made up of feasts and fasts, and fasting or feasting, the inhabitants are forever ringing the bells, discharging holy squibs and rockets, and walking in tumultuous processions. I lived weeks amid this din, and never could get accustomed to it, nor enjoy that hearty sound slumber which Sancho apostrophizes as the best of wrappers. But, in fairness, it must be added that fiestas have their attractions for strangers as well as their disagreeables. On these days, especially on notable holidays, such as that of Nuestra Senora de la Merced, the fair sex come forth in their gayest attire, and walk in bevies to the churches. It is then, if you are an impartial Paris, that you will resolve to bestow your golden apple on the fear the financial difficulties which trouble THE United States have no reason to Creole Venus in preference to all other beauties, nearly all the Governments of Continental so lovely are the faces that shine upon you from Europe. English experience shows that a under the coquettish mantilla, and so graceful great landed family can scarcely be permathe figures that undulate along the streets. nently ruined, even when it has the bad forThere may, indeed, be rosier cheeks and fairer tune of being represented for two or three skins elsewhere, but not such large black eyes, generations by unprincipled spendthrifts. teeth of such dazzling whiteness, such taper A country of unbounded natural wealth enwaists, and faultless feet and ankles, as belong to the Venezuelan ladies. As for any devout joys, for similar reasons, a more complete feeling, that, of course, is entirely out of the immunity; nor can perversity of taxes, of question. The women come forth to be looked tariffs, or of bad faith, seriously impair the at, and the men stand in groups on the church vast resources of America. The most zealsteps, or cluster inside, to look at them. All ous Protectionists never think of interfering round the churches are pictures, usually sad with perfect free-trade throughout the large daubs, and a profusion of wax dolls, represent- section of the continent which extends from ing the Virgin at various periods of her life. the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Anything more contrary to common sense, to great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and alsay nothing of good taste and devotional feeling, most all Americans, though not one citizen than these images, it is impossible to conceive. in ten thousand understands the rudiments Among the absurd groups of dolls I was partic- of political economy, would on fit opportuularly struck with one at the Merced fiesta, in nity gladly extend the political and comwhich the Virgin, dressed in all the frippery im-mercial frontier to the Arctic Circle and to aginable, was kneeling beside a gigantic crucifix, the Isthmus of Panama. The old-fashioned while a six-year-old angel fluttered above the cross, dressed in silver-embroidered trunk hose, and tartan leggings of the Royal Stuart pattern. About the middle of the day, when the heat is most trying, there is generally a procession, and the image or picture of the saint is carried about amid a train of ecclesiastics, and with a body of

restrictions which, down to the days of TURGOT, separated every French province from its neighbours, have, through the fortunate arrangement which gave Congress control over indirect taxation, never divided the American States. A protective policy

which only impedes commercial intercourse of taxation was not unlike PITT's early exbetween great countries is less injurious periments, and it was at first accepted with than the isolation of petty districts, as the remarkable docility; but in the course of great national conflicts of modern times in- three or four years the taxpayers have natterfere with the comfort of life less than urally become impatient, and one internal the private feuds of the middle ages, or the impost after another has been removed, hostilities of the cities of Greece. Econo- while the Customs' duties have been inmists must be surprised, while they are creased to an excessive and unremuneragratified, by a crucial demonstration of the tive amount. It is not, in fact, wise, in truth of their doctrines, when they observe the circumstances of the United States, to the deleterious results of an exclusive poli- raise a surplus revenue for the discharge ey on the trade and industry of a country of debt. The immediate pressure on inwhich is a world in itself. America could dustry is more injurious than a fixed burden, perhaps afford to discourage foreign im- which, if it remained nominally the same, ports if the tariff had not the collateral ef- would under the influence of two different fect of reacting on domestic skill and enter- causes constantly become less onerous. prise. The manufacturers and shipbuilders The fall in the value of gold yearly reduces who have persuaded the community to sub- the real amount of the debt, while the rapsidize them at an enormous cost naturally id increase of population and wealth alters become more careless and more indifferent the proportion of the mortgaged property to improvement, and their workmen are to the charge. For the last year the atconstantly claiming a share in their unprof- tempts to reduce the debt which once exitable monopoly. The unprincipled legisla- cited Mr. GLADSTONE'S exaggerated adtion for the restriction of labour by which Congress has prepared for the Presidential election is closely connected with the protective system, as well as with the political institutions which entrust supreme power to ignorance and selfishness. American trade and production are heavily weighted, but, as long as millions of acres of unexhausted land are successively brought into cultivation, no stupidity of politicians can prevent the population from flourishing.

The fiscal arrangements, properly so called, of the United States, are more reasonable than the commercial system. At the close of the war, which was necessarily conducted with borrowed money, Congress imposed large and indiscriminate taxes on every article of consumption, and on almost every ordinary transaction. At that time it was supposed that none but a rebel, or a supporter of rebellion, could meditate repudiation; and, in the utter ignorance of financial and economical science which prevails throughout the States, it was popufarly imagined that the debt might in a short interval be paid off from the produce of the taxes, not where they would do least damage, but where commodities could be intercepted on their way from the producer to the consumer; and their successors even in the present day are partly guided by the same consideration. After the Ameriean war, PITT acquired his first fame as a financial Minister by imposing with a lavish hand on almost innumerable articles of consumption the duties which were long afterwards removed, with equal credit to their reputation, by Sir ROBERT PEEL and Mr. GLADSTONE. The American system

miration have been almost entirely discontinued. But for the high rate of interest which corresponds to the questionable good faith of the American community, there would be no need for heavy taxation.

The

Among many material felicities, the United States are exempt from the real or supposed necessity of maintaining the vast naval and military establishments which weigh down European finances. Americans can never be engaged in war except at their own pleasure; and in case of need they have found that they can extemporise an army, though perhaps not a navy. During the four years of the civil war the Northern States raised two millions of men, and there were times at which they maintained a quarter of that number in the field. The army of recruits was of course far inferior in proportional efficiency to a force more carefully and slowly organized; but numbers more than made up for all deficiencies, and General GRANT was able to expend, in his Richmond campaign, much more than the whole force of the enemy, and to win at last by outliving the weaker belligerent. No war has ever been nearly so costly, but it was cheaper to finish the contest in four years than to spread it over a dozen campaigns. As soon as the war was over, it became unnecessary to provide pay or pension except for those who had been disabled, and for distressed widows and orphans. The unlimited demand for all kinds of labour was the best pension fund, and within a year or two the bulk of the great Federal army had been reabsorbed by civil life. Generals and colonels are practising law, keeping shops, or teaching

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