DRAMATIC TRAVELS. The Diligence from Paris to Lyons. MADAME de Staël (and hers is the best name I know to lead off an essay) declared, that, were she going to the gallows, she would be busied all the way in scrutinizing the characters of her fellow-convicts. No doubt, she was thinking of the old times, when one was sure to meet with good company, and plenty of it, in a trip to the guillotine. Not being over-particular, I must prefer, for the scene of my observations, a vehicle of less dispatch; for in running post to the other world, according to the supposition of the ever-supposing Baroness, I should be a deal too absorbed in number One to be at all dramatic. Such scenes are rather too much for a joke—and I here may mention having been for the first time highly disgusted with the facetious Pierce Egan, for representing the last scene of the condemned in one of his variegated caricatures. No-give me a Diligence, that pleasant misnomer, that with sixteen, eighteen, nay, twenty passengers, stowed in three cabins, and a parachute-looking affair called a Cabriolet, at top, together with I know not how many tons weight of baggage, rolls along the pavé at the rate of two-miles-and-a-half per hour, stoppages non-included. "Didst ever see a Diligence?"-Wert thou ever, then, at Chelsea or Battle-bridge, at Greenwich or Brook-Green fair?-Saw'st thou the elephant's vehicle and habitation, or that of the lion's ?" Walk in, gentlemen!"-You may remember these. Such is a Diligence! And lumbering vehicles as they are, enough indeed to drown any John Bull in a flood of spleen, yet, let me tell you, the yard of the Messageries Royales beats out and out your White Horse Cellar, or your Swan with Two Necks. I don't talk of Portsmouth, or Liverpool, or voyages in the seaway, for "that beats Banagher," as we Irishmen say; but in the quiet, well-behaved, rowley-powley mode of travelling on dry land, the very sublime of tantalization is the Messageries. Only suppose one of our island brethren dropt there, one of those fellows, greedy of travel, with the organ of space protruding like a horn from the midst of his forehead, with what feelings must he peruse the inscriptions on the Diligence and over the bureaus,-to Bayonne and Madrid-to Lyons, Turin, Milan, Rome, &c.—to Strasburg, Munich, Vienna-to Berlinto St. Petersburg. Lord bless you, sir, 'twould be as much as his life's worth! "En route," cries the conducteur, "Montez, Messieurs;" but before getting in, and, consequently, describing my company, I must premise that the Diligence has five horses;-'tis strange, but I have always found that French postilions, like poets (is it poets?) delight in odd numbers. For many a cogitative post was this point a subject of puzzle and annoyance to me. I asked the reason of all and every postilion; they shook their enormous cues, but answered nothing, till, at last, one fellow, more knowing than the rest, told me with a sly look at his legboxes, that the odd horse was for his boots. This reason was fully adequate. Being all seated, we trotted off, and ere the coach reached Fontainbleau, I was in full possession of the country, profession, and opinions of my fellow-passengers. In spite of my wishing to be a bit of a republican, I never yet encountered a society, great or small, without being thoroughly convinced of the non-existence and moral impossi bility of equality: go where you will, there is always a cock of the walk. There was one here-a stout, well-built, comfortable Breton, of that province of France which preserves, in character, the similarity to Old England, which its name and origin would lead us to expect. Our Breton, however, was not all English: a sharp hook nose, and jaw of more than ordinary dimensions, bespoke the Frenchman. He accosted us all gaily, without any of that long ice-breaking conversation about the weather, which generally occupies the first half-hour of our stage-coach journeys. Of the postilions, peasants, conducteur, &c. he demanded divers questions out of the window in an authoritative tone, designating them with a supercilious tu. Sweet second person singular!—not when thus flung to a menial or inferior, but when the fascinating lip of the foreign fair allows, and replies with the endearing monosyllable.-Reader, if thou intendest to act the gallant traveller, a kind now the most fashionable amongst us, and strangely omitted by Sterne, and if in thy first adventure thine ears are saluted with the novel and delightful sounds of mon cœur―je suis à vous, &c. &c. believe them not. One tu, one va, one va-t-en, is worth a thousand pathetic sentences and protestations, unless, indeed, the lady should go so far as to call you her good friend, her bon ami, for that denotes a conquest won. -Strange that so vivacious a nation should use, in appearance, the coldest terms of endearment, should mark their affection by one syllable, and its highest point by three.-" Ma respectable amie," writes St. Preux to Julie.-What a sentence for an English lover to preface a love-letter with!" My respectable friend!"-O Jehu! The worthy Breton had received answers from, that is, made acquaintance with, all the inmates of our rumbling tabernacle, save and except one, an English dandy, who as yet had not recovered confidence enough in strange company to trust his mouth with French. He, however, shewed his affability and wish to be conversable by admiring with his eyes and fingers the fur-pelisse of the Breton. Having felt it for some time, he demanded what it was made of ?" Wolf-skin.”—To which, in the true dandy chain of argument, the Englishman redemanded, where such was to be had, and what it would cost?" Un coup de fusil?" said the Breton." And there are such animals here?" said the Briton.-"Sure as a gun, in Bretagne," said the other.-About ten minutes had elapsed, when my dandy drew out his memorandum-book, as by stealth, and noted down-Mem.-Wolves in Brittany. In the corner opposite to me sat an old corporal of the Ex, or imperial guard, as I soon found out, when the view of the little inn at Cour de France, where Napoleon passed the night of the surrender of Paris, and the Chateau of Fontainbleau, the scene of the Emperor's first abdication, led us to talk of the great man. The corporal had been in Spain, and in Russia, and at Leipsic he had bidden adieu for a while to the grande armée, having got heartily tired of fighting all day, and accompanying the Emperor all night with torches. I envied the rogue's situation of holding a candle to Napoleon. He added, that his regiment has been ecrasé, annihilated at Vaterloo; that, as one of the ex-guard, he could not hope to be again employed; and that he was returning to Nismes, his native town, to turn his sword into a ploughshare. Yet he did not speak as a thorough Bonapartist, whose extreme and uncompromising admirers are now, I have remarked, for the most part confined to England. Like almost all the French militaires, he had grown not a little ashamed of the later invasions of Napoleon; and he had made that progress in impartiality, which the ignorant generally do, who never arrive farther than common-place. He hated the English mortally, and told me so, for which I honoured him internally, externally striving to put on a smile of contempt; and the fellow was deeply read in the twenty volumes of the "Victoires et Conquêtes des Français," which he quoted, chapter and verse, to my frequent discomfiture, who could by no means cope with the twenty volumes. To complete my dramatis persona, I should describe the bodkins, otherwise the occupiers of the middle seats, who, however, exchanged places now and then with other and divers wights from the cabriolet, a parte post, and a parte ante, as Mr. Coleridge would describe them. The bodkins proper, consisted of a young gentleman and his wife, both of whom (for in France, in forty-nine cases out of fifty, the grey mare is the better horse) had a little time since established an iron-foundry on the banks of the Loire, through the means of English capital, English machinery, and English workmen an hundred of the latter, he informed me, he had transported from Wales and Staffordshire to his manufactory near La Charité: the rogues did well, but liked the wine too much. He spoke of England, and of Mr. Crachy, the roi de fer. The little man, and his little wife, talked, looked, and breathed nothing less than iron, which, with the brass of the corporal and the Breton, left us Englishmen to look rather soft in such metallic company. I never yet was in diligence, stage, or public vehicle, that each passenger did not vow, that it was the narrowest and most uncomfortable one he ever was in; this consequently was ejaculated and echoed, nem. con., the responses of the bodkins being the longest and most querulous. "Last year," said the man of iron," there was delightful travelling, and cheap, by the voiture of the master of the Posts, that brought one in two nights to Lyons; but our blessed government, which meddles with every thing, was bribed by a round sum of money from the Diligence-office to put a stop to the competition. So now we pay double, and take double the time-the blessed effects of legitimacy. This is not the way they manage matters in England." The Breton being an Ultra and a Bourbonist, kindled at the word legitimacy, as did the corporal at the mention of England, and they growled their invectives in such unison, that it was impossible to understand either. "It's the way with you all," continued the surviving voice of the Breton; "all you sacrés négocians et fabriquans,' damned merchants and manufacturers, are insurrectionists, and carbonari, and wish the downfall of your legitimate Sovereigns." The little man, instead of repelling the accusation, grinned assent, and began to open his case by the Guerre d'Espagne. Here they fell to it tooth and nail, the Breton quoting the Drapeau Blanc to prove that Bessières had taken Madrid, and his antagonist bringing forward the Constitutionnel to prove the fleets and armies that England was preparing to defend the Peninsula withal. Here the corporal broke in, je voudrais bien voir Messieurs les Anglais encore une fois en Espagne." I observed," he might perhaps have that pleasure." The corporal, skilled in his art, knew the ground he held was weak; so he took up an ironical position. "But the English, it must be allowed," said he, " are good soldiers, they fight almost as well as the Russians."* "Why,” said I, with a lucky memory at the moment," which of your regiments was it, that beat so gallantly the Russian Imperial Guards at Austerlitz ?" "Twas my own," said the soldier with kindling enthusiasm; "it was the chasseurs of the imperial guard that culbutaient, upset, the Russians at Austerlitz." -"You yourself belonged to that regiment? then you must have been also in Portugal at the passage of the Esla?" The corporal answered “Oh, oui," with a most involuntary accent, it being there that Lord Paget overthrew and cut up the said chasseurs with notable slaughter. "But we were out numbered," continued he, "as we always were when beaten-at Toulouse, for instance, were you not double our number?"" Perhaps so, but you were beaten; at Talavera, you were double our number, yet were repulsed." The corporal was about to reply, when he was taken in flank by my dandy compatriot with a burst of French and English, but so mingled and so uncouthly pronounced, that neither of us knew what to make of it. It, however, interrupted an argument which might have gone farther than was agreeable. Thus we jogged on through the wild and rocky tract beyond Fontainbleau, the beautiful town of Nemours, and Montargis, when night overtook us. Thence the next day, along the Loire to Nevers, where we were assailed by myriads of those manufacturers of bead purses, bead cords, and bead every thing, selling for sous what costs shillings in England. The Loire is broad and grand, but it possesses no beauty, -I was going to observe great rivers seldom do, but the Rhine occurred, and saved me from an assertion which France and Italy would allow. We had lost our bodkins, and here took in others, people of the country, who joined the corporal in relating feats of the French arms, and bearing testimony to each other's veracity mutually. Their vaunts, however, did not interfere with me, as here the Austrians were concerned, being encamped for a long time in 1814, they on one side of the Loire and Davoust on the other, in a state of truce nominally, but really in continual perils to the Germans from the hatred, sagacity, and courage of the French peasantry. Roanne was generally the scene of these short and sanguinary struggles. Here we passed a beautiful bridge of Napoleon's, not yet over the Loire, but at the side of it. I forgot to mention that we had passed through Moulins, nay through its very market-place, as mean and dirty a hole as ever was hallowed by sentiment. To look for Maria was in vain; the girls of the Bourbonnais are not pretty, and French girls know how to console themselves in better ways than Maria with her pipe. Neither Dandy, Breton, nor Corporal, had ever read the Sentimental Journey; so I was left to a long soliloquy on Sterne and sentiment,-" all that sort of thing and every thing in the world."-Mounting Tarare, and rolling down to Lyons, little conversation passed worth recording; we entered the second capital of France, and found it in a devil of an uproar -it was the funeral of the God Mercury, the Deity of Commerce, whose obsequies seven or eight hundred youths had followed; and they had finished by casting poor Commerce into the Rhone, to the great annoyance and occupation of the police. "La sanglante journée de Talavera avait repandu l'effroi dans l'armée Française, et l'on convenait que les Anglais se battaient tout aussi bien que les Russes."-French Account of the Peninsula War. MR. BARRY CORNWALL'S NEW POEMS.* We regret that this volume has not reached us sufficiently early in the course of our preparation for the present Number, to enable us either to enter into a critical discussion of its merits at such length as they deserve, or to give as many extracts as we could wish. But the name and reputation of the author are well known, and the following specimens of the Flood of Thessaly and the Girl of Provence will enable the reader at least to judge of the characteristic beauty of two of the principal poems. In the former of these, the phenomenon of a deluge is thus very powerfully delineated. Higher and higher fled the wasted throngs, And still they hoped for life, and still they died, Still the ruin fell: Was vanishing like a dream. Lightning and Storm, To madness, and the riotous winds laughed out Like Bacchanals, whose cups some God has charmed. (Kings' homes or towering graves) in a breath were swept Uptorn and floating, hollow rocks brute-crammed, Offered, like twice ten thousand hecatombs, 啡 Still fell the flooding rains. Still the Earth shrank: Fierce lightnings burnt the sky, and the loud thunder Below, the Ocean rose boiling and black, And flung its monstrous billows far and wide Crumbling the mountain joints and summit hills; Where, with enormous waves on their broad backs, Hissed the Sea-angels; and earth-buried broods The Flood of Thessaly, the Girl of Provence, and other Poems, by Barry Cornwall. 8vo. |