At Turin was the finest dancer I ever saw, a girl of the name of De' Martini. M. Laurent should invite her over. She appeared to me to unite the agility of the French school, with all that you would expect from the Italian. Italian dancers are in general as indifferent, as the French are celebrated: but the French have no mind with their bodies: they are busts in barbers' shops, stuck upon legs in a fit. You wonder how any lower extremities so lively can leave such an absence of all expression in the upper. Now De' Martini is a dancer all over, and does not omit her face. She is a body not merely saltatory, as a machine might be, but full of soul. When she came bounding on the stage, in two or three long leaps like a fawn, I should have thought she was a Frenchwoman, but the style undeceived me. She came bounding in front, as if she would have pitched herself into the arms of the pit; then made a sudden drop, and addressed three enthusiastic courtesies to the pit and boxes, with a rapidity and yet a grace, a self-abandonment, yet a self-possession, quite extraordinary, and such, as to do justice to it, should be described by a poet uniting the western ideas of the sex with eastern license. Then she is beautiful both in face and figure, and I thought was a proper dancer to appear before a pit full of those fine fellows I have just spoken of. She seemed

as complete in her way as themselves. In short, I never saw any thing like it before; and did not wonder, that she had the reputation of turning the heads of dozens wherever she went.

At Sant-Ambrogio, a little town between Turin and Susa, is a proper castle-topped mountain à la Radcliffe, the only one we had met with. Susa has some remains connected with Augustus; but Augustus is nobody, or ought to be nobody, to a traveller in modern Italy. He, and twenty like him, never gave me one sensation, all the time I was there; and even the better part of the Romans it is difficult to think of. There is something formal and cold about their history, in spite of Virgil and Horace, and even in spite of their own violence, which does not harmonize with the south. And their poets, even the best of them, were copiers of the Greek

poets, not originals like Dante and Petrarch. So we slept at Susa, not thinking of Augustus, but listening to waterfalls, and thinking of the Alps.

of

Next morning we beheld a sight worth living for. We were now ascending the Alps; and while yet in the darkness before the dawn, we beheld the sunshine of day basking on the top of one of the mountains. We drank it into our souls, and there it is for ever. Dark as any hour may be, it seems as if that sight were left for us to look up to, and feel a hope. The passage the Alps (thanks to Bonaparte, whom a mountaineer, with brightness in his eyes, called "Napoleone di felice me moria") is now as easy as a road in England. You look up towards airy galleries, and down upon villages that appear like toys, and feel somewhat disappointed at rolling over it all so easily.

The moment we passed the Alps, we found ourselves in France. At Lanslebourg, French was spoken, and amorous groups gesticulated on the papering and curtains. Savoy is a glorious country, a wonderful intermixture of savage precipices and pastoral meads: but the roads are still uneven and bad. The river ran and tumbled, as if in a race with our tumbling carriage. At one time you are in a road like a gigantic rut, deep down in a valley; and at another, up in the air, wheeling along a precipice, I know not how many times as high as St. Paul's.

At Chambéry I could not resist going to see the house of Rousseau and Madame de Warens, while the coach stopped. It is up a beautiful lane, where you have trees all the way, sloping fields on either side, and a brook; as fit a scene as could be desired. I met some Germans coming away, who congratulated me on being bound, as they had been, to the house of "Jean Jacques." The house itself is of the humbler genteel class, not fitted to conciliate Mr. Moore; but neat and white, with green blinds. The little chapel, that cost its mistress so much, is still remaining. We proceeded through Lyons and Auxerre to Paris. Beyond Lyons, we met on the road the statue of Louis XIV. going to that city to overawe it with royal brass. It was an

esquestrian statue, covered up, guarded with soldiers, and looking on the road like some mysterious heap. Don Quixote would have attacked it, and not been thought mad so much has romance done for us. The natives would infallibly have looked quietly on. There was a riot about it at Lyons, soon after its arrival. Statues rise and fall; but a little on the other side of Lyons, our postilion exclaimed, "Monte Bianco !" and turning round, I beheld, for the first time, Mont Blanc, which had been hidden from us, when near it, by a fog. It looked like a turret in the sky, amber-coloured, golden, belonging to the wall of some etherial world. This, too, is in our memories for ever,-an addition to our stock, -a light for memory to turn to, when it wishes a beam upon its face.

At Paris we could stop but two days, and I had but two thoughts in my head; one of the Revolution, the other of the times of Molière and Boileau. Accordingly, I looked about for the Sorbonne, and went to see the place where the guillotine stood; were thousands of spirits underwent the last pang; many guilty, many innocent, but all the victims of a re-action against tyranny, such as will never let tyranny be what it was, unless a convulsion of nature should swallow up knowledge, and make the world begin over again. These are the thoughts that enable us to bear such sights, and that serve to secure what we hope for.

Paris, besides being a beautiful city in the quarter that strangers most look to, the Tuileries, Quai de Voltaire, &c., delights the eye of a man of letters by its heap of book-stalls. There is a want perhaps of old books; but the new are better than the shoal of Missals and Lives of the Saints that disappoint the lover of duodecimos on the stalls of Italy; and the Rousseaus and Voltaires are endless; edition upon edition in all shapes and sizes, in intellectual battle-array, not to be put down, and attracting armies into desertion. thought, if I were a bachelor, not an Englishman, and had no love for old friends and fields, I could live very well for the rest of my life in a lodging above one of the bookseller's shops on the Quai de Voltaire, where

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I should look over the water to the Tuileries, and have the Elysian fields in my eye for my evening walk.

But this

I liked much what little I saw of the French people. They are accused of vanity; and doubtless they have it, and after a more obvious fashion than other nations; but their vanity at least includes the wish to please; other people are necessary to them; they are not wrapped up in themselves; not sulky, not too vain even to tolerate vanity. Their vanity is too much confounded with selfsatisfaction. There is a good deal of touchiness, I suspect, among them,-a good deal of ready-made heat, prepared to fire up in case the little commerce of flattery and sweetness is not properly carried on. is better than ill temper, or an egotism not to be appeased by any thing short of subjection. On the other hand, there is more melancholy than one could expect, especially in old faces. Consciences in the south are frightened in their old age, perhaps for nothing. In the north I take it, they are frightened earlier, perhaps from equal want of knowledge. The worst in France is, (at least, from all that I saw) that fine old faces are rare. There are multitudes of pretty girls; but the faces of both sexes fall off deplorably as they advance in life; which is not a good symptom. Nor do the pretty faces, while they last, appear to contain much depth, or sentiment, or firmness of purpose. They seem made like their toys, not to last, but to break up. Fine faces in Italy are as abundant as cypresses. However, in both countries, the inhabitants appeared to us naturally amiable, as well as intelligent; and without disparagement to the angel faces which you meet with in England, and some of which are perhaps even finer than any you see elsewhere, I could not help thinking, that as a race of females, the aspects both of the French and Italian women announced more sweetness and reasonableness of intercourse, than those of my fair and serious countrywomen. A Frenchwoman looked as if she wished to please you at any rate, and to be pleased herself. She is too conscious; and her coquetry is said, and I believe with truth, to promise more than an Englishman would easily find her to perform: but at any rate she thinks of you

somehow, and is smiling and good- umoured. An Italian woman appears to think of nothing, ot even herself. Existence seems enough for her. Pit she also is easy of intercourse, smiling when you speak to her, and very unaffected. Now in simplicity of character the Italian appears to me to have the advantage of the English women, and in pleasantness of intercourse both Italian and French. When I came to England, after a residence of four years abroad, I was shocked at the

ession of fair sulky faces which I met in the streets London. They all appeared to come out of unhappy omes. In truth, our virtues, or our climate, or whatever it is, sit so uneasily upon us, that it is surely worth while for our philosophy to inquire whether in some points, or some degree of a point, we are not a little mistaken. Gypseys will hardly allow us to lay it to the climate.

It was a blessed moment, nevertheless, when we found ourselves among those dear sulky faces, the country women of dearer ones, not sulky. On the 12th .. October, we set out from Calais in the steam-boat, which carried us rapidly to London, energetically trembling all the way under us, as if its burning body partook of the fervour of our desire. Here, in the neighbourhood of London, we are; and may we never be without our old fields again in this world, or the old "familiar faces" in this world or in the next.