STEAM is working well and working wonders. Greater marvels even than railways at sixty miles an hour, and six-day trips across the Atlantic, are achieved by its agency. It is teaching Frenchmen to appreciate and admire England, and to view their near neighbours otherwise than through a mist of prejudice as dense as the fog in which they have long believed us to live eternally enveloped. They actually admit that the sun occasionally shines on Albion's capital-on Sundays, when the factory chimneys fume not, and Anglicans eat cold dinners out of respect for the Sabbath. These new convictions are the triumph of steam. Vapour has dispelled fog. Other facts besides journeys in twelve hours from Paris to London have concurred to enlighten the French. With the solitary exception of the eccentric Col. Sibthorp, nobody in the United Kingdom, we presume, will deny that the Exhibition of 1851 had an important effect in doing away with lingering national antipathies, and in raising this country and its people in the estimation of the whole Continent. With this fact is linked, as regards France, one still more important and influential. The French have lately been afflicted in a manner to them very unusual: they have been suffering from shame. The national amour propre, the easy, harmless, self-sufficiency which has carried them selfapprovingly through so many trying and disastrous circumstances, has given way within the last half-dozen years. They have felt themselves sunk as a nation in the opinion of Europe. They are ashamed of that paltry juggle known as the February Revolution, when a few greedy and corrupt demagogues, backed by the scum of Paris, and favoured by the feebleness of the authorities and the inertness of the National Guard, ejected a dynasty, subverted the institutions of France, and commenced, by their impure rule, a period of anarchy, misery, and

bloodshed, terminating in despotism. They are ashamed of the saturnalia of the Provisional Government, and of the men they then allowed to lead them; they are bitterly mindful of the bloody massacres of June, whose extent none know or dare attempt to compute; they blush for the bear-garden parliaments of the Presidency, and they bow their heads with a feeling of merited humiliation under the present absolute regime. After thus passing from one evil to another, their latter state even worse than their first, until they at last find themselves stripped of even the shadow of the liberty for which they have so struggled and suffered, and compelled to admit that, for the time at least, despotism is their only salvation, they could hardly, in the respite afforded them from the cares of selfgovernment, help being struck by their own contrast with the neighbouring nation, which had never enjoyed greater prosperity and internal peace than during the period of their lamentable depression. They have had innumerable opportunities of personally noting the difference. Exile for political causes, visits to persons so situated, and the attractions of the year 1851, have brought the French to our shores by tens of thousands. Amongst the multitude there could not fail to be intelligent and candid men, who, casting away stereotyped prejudices, and making use of their own powers of observation, recognised good where it really existed, and admired, above all, the spectacle, almost unknown in their own country, of a free people, flourishing under a constitutional government, obedient to the law, and devoted to the cause of order.

We have been accustomed to take up French books about England with much the same expectation with which we open a portfolio of caricatures and pictorial extravaganzas-looking more for amusement than for truth, for impertinence than for information.

The day will probably come when Frenchmen will be able to form and write as sensible an appreciation of England and the English as Mr Max Schlesinger or any other soberlyjudging intelligent German. Until that time arrives, we are quite willing to accept good-humouredly, and to criticise leniently, as a step in the right direction, such volumes as that which has just reached us from Mr Francis Wey, a French man of letters and a feuilletoniste, author of various philological works, narratives of travel, novels and tales. Indulgence should never be withheld from the man who writes frankly and kindly of a country where he has been kindly received, who seems glad to praise when his conscience permits him, and who, when he censures or ridicules, does it wittily and without malignity.

Unlike many of his countrymen, who, for some mysterious reason, visit London in its worst season, the autumu, Mr Wey came to us in summer, when the town was full, the opera open, the clubs like beehives, the park brilliant. He came with an excursion train with it, but not of it. His forty travelling-companions were to see London in a week; he proposed devoting seven times seven days to the same occupation. The time was short enough, he thought, to form anything like a settled opinion upon so great a country and a people. But who shall assign limits to human presumption? "I care little about monuments," said one of the hebdomadal tourists to him as they steamed up the Thames (the route that every foreigner coming to London for the first time should take), "one can see them everywhere. My aim, during our week's excursion, is thoroughly to investigate the manners (les mœurs) of the English, so as to be able to make up my mind concerning them." Mr Wey was struck dumb by this astounding announcement. The pretension of acquiring a thorough knowledge of English usages and society during a week passed in a Leicester Square hotel, seemed to him, as well it might, ludicrously monstrous. On the other hand, his companion, whilst miscalculating possibilities, unquestionably started from a just idea; the best way of becoming acquainted with

To

England was to study the private life of the various classes of the English people and the internal mechanism of their civilisation. But how could the daring adventurer expect to complete such a study in a week, especially when he formed part of a sight-seeing expedition, organised for a gallop through all manner of curiosities, exhibitions, and public buildings? As if he read Mr Wey's thoughts, the excursionist replied to them." The time is short," he said; "the opportunities are few, but the object of study is everywhere. observe, sir, one needs neither leisure, a guide, nor a guide-book. There are persons who would pass twenty years in London, and see less than others in twenty days. To observe, requires an observer; just as to paint, you must have a painter; and time has nothing to do with the business. Besides, for him who can understand, everything narrates and describes; edifices explain institutions; the physiognomy of the streets, the gait of the passengers, are like certain effects whose causes one connects: everywhere symbols meet the eye, and the stones themselves have a language." These were old sentiments, but in rather a novel form, and hardly expected from the lips of a Parisian cockney, abroad for a week's holiday. They set Mr Wey a-thinking, and helped him to a plan. His fellow-voyager's confidence gave him courage, and emboldened him to hope that fortynine days, judiciously employed, might enable him to form sound notions of men and things English, and to avoid the errors and exaggerations so common amongst his countrymen. resolved to profit, during the first week, by the rapidity and facilities of the organised excursion, to see sights and buildings; then to take up his quarters in an English family; deliver his letters of recommendation to persons of various classes and professions, and study the people he dwelt amongst. He carried out his plan, and acquired, he tells us, the conviction that England is very illappreciated, and very little known in France: a state of things which we are glad to think that every day is altering for the better. tions cannot fail to be

He

Such altera

promoted by

books so well intended, and upon the whole so sensible as the one before us. It were flattery to assure Mr Wey that he has uniformly escaped errors whilst writing about a country in which he has made but one brief sojourn. But, although some of his blunders are laughable enough, not many of them are of the vulgar kind common to most Frenchmen who sketch England, and they are never of the wilful and ill-natured class that have their origin in illiberality and prejudice. The mistakes he falls into are such as a little reading and inquiry would have enabled him to avoid, and some are explained by his slight knowledge of the English language. On social matters, where he had opportunity of judging for himself, his remarks are generally extremely just. At some of his blunders it is impossible to help laughing, whilst wondering how he can have committed them, and suspecting that he must have been the victim of a hoax. Thus, for instance, when in the city of London, after describing corporate magnificence, the splendours of the aldermen and sheriffs, the Gothic and venerable privileges of the lord mayor, the liveries surpassing in gorgeousness those of the Marquis of Carabas, the gilt carriages and other antiquated pomps, now menaced by ruthless foes with speedy abolition, he gravely winds up with the following astounding piece of information:-" The power of the lord mayor is very extensive, and, when the throne is vacant, it is be who presides over the council of state until the proclamation of the new sovereign." Opening the book at random, and chancing upon this huge absurdity, one's first impulse would be either to pitch it into the fire, or to put it carefully by as an antidote to the blue devils, and a source of unextinguishable laughter. It would be wrong to judge it by such passages, which are of rare occurrence, and which the author might easily have avoided by reference to one of his English friends. Neither do we quarrel with the burlesque exaggerations of English foibles, which are more frequent than anintentional misstatements; for Mr Wey is a decided humourist, unable

always to resist letting fly the shafts of his wit; and, moreover, his French readers would set him down as partial and unworthy of credit, did he not occasionally help them to a smile at Britannic peculiarities. Upon the other hand, he does not spare his own countrymen, to whom, at first starting, he gives a pretty smart lesson, reproaching them with their stay-at-home propensities, and with the disadvantages resulting from them. Thence, he says, proceeds their sole inferiority to other northern races; thence their numerous prejudices, the difficulties of their intercourse with other nations, their inexpertness as colonists, the narrow limits of their historical erudition, and most of the mistakes that embarrass their foreign policy. "English statesmen," he continues, "know the habitable world as well as our police agents know the quarters of Paris. If there be an example suited to inspire us with more adventurous tastes it is that of the people which, almost superstitiously national, has yet taken the entire globe for its country. Our nation, routed, by the railroad invasion, out of its habitual indifference to foreign countries, has invented a means of looking at everything and seeing nothing. Thanks to excursion trains, everybody will soon be able to boast of having been everywhere, and of knowing all that can be learned from valets de place, ignorant guides, incapable demonstrators, ever repeating the same tale, taking all persons to the same places, and regulating with absolute authority what is or is not to be seen." In England, Mr Wey justly maintains, this system is more disadvantageous and objectionable than in any other country for persons desirous of becoming acquainted with its true physiognomy and characteristics. The study of a nation that lives principally at home, whose tastes are domestic, that prefers comfort to pleasure, and the cheerful fireside circle to the glare and excitement of theatres and coffeehouses, is necessarily more difficult than that of a people who are never so little at home as in their own houses, and whose favourite existence is out of doors and in public places.

His exordium concluded, Mr Wey presents himself to us off Ramsgate a town surrounded, he poetically informs us, by "villas thrown like flowers amidst tufts of trees. These cottages are called tea-houses." It is twilight, and sunrise is at hand when he reaches "Herneby, a bathing town, completely reflected in the blue water, like an oriental city." Why, Mr Wey, did you not just now tell us that, "on this classic land of the positive and the real, truth is incompatible with poetical exaggerations and the artifices of composition"? Poor Herne Bay, the rejected of Cockneys, the pasture of Punch, an oriental city! You will next compare Gravesend to Venice. Avoid comparisons, we pray of you, and get us speedily into London streets. Your definition of the Thames is happier, and nearer to the truth." From London to Gravesend the Thames is a port, in which the ships of all countries are drawn up by hundreds together. Below Gravesend it is an arm of the sea. From its source to London it is an arcadian stream, winding through meadows, and giving grace and freshness to parks. In London it is a quay serving as a warehouse, for the houses on the bank rise out of the mud, and communicate directly with the shipping. Between those quays of mud and water, there is a large street full of omnibuses and people; the omnibuses are steamboats, and the street is still the Thames." Enraptured with the throng of vessels, masses of warehouses, spacious docks, and wonderful activity he on all sides beholds, our intelligent eller approaches the and

"It is nearly sun silvers the rnish the azure ambitious kind of , and apt to lead incongruities. The of the Pool have xicating effect upon pire him with preposus. But that he seems int passage, we should be under the influence dies-and-waters," preconsiderate steward of Boulogne" as remedial achs under difficulties. ate in his orientalism.

Before coming to the Tower he discovers that London has "a sort of look of the East or of India. One thinks vaguely of Tyre, Carthage, the banks of the Ganges, the Dutch towns of the old Flemish painters, of mercantile America, of the fantastical and vaguely-seen cities of the country of the Chinese." What a jumble of inapt similes. He will frequently take a Newcastle collier for a Maltese galley, or a Scotch steamer for a Spanish galleon. We are quite glad when we get him on terra firma, cursing the customhouse, and beg to chime in with his maledictions. "If ever it enters the head of some patient and benevolent tourist to celebrate the charms of the French customhouse, let him seek his inspiration in that of London; he could not do better. In France that institution is armed with the claws of the cat; to these the English customhouse adds the slowness of the boa digesting a meal. The little ceremony lasts but five or six hours, unless one lands on a Sunday, in which case one must wait for one's baggage until the following day." It is some years since we landed at London from the Continent, and then Mr Wey's complaint would have been perfectly justified by the tedious and unaccommodating arrangements of the customhouse; but there has been, we believe, a recent change, and luggage is now examined on board the boats as they ascend the river. At the ports upon the coast, the passing of baggage is usually as rapid as in France. In all other respects there can be no comparison between the customhouses of the two countries. Mr Wey is far too indulgent to his green-coated douaniers, when he ascribes to them the claws of the cat, whereas they are a compound of the lynx, the hyena, and the jackal. For incivility, rapacity, and wilful infliction of annoyance, we will back the French customhouses against any in the world. Complaints of them are so universal that it is surprising the superior authorities do not interfere to modify a system which must tend to make travellers to Germany and Switzerland prefer any route to those through France. The wretched sum annually raised by taxing tourists' travelling rugs and half-pounds of

Cigars is certainly not for an instant to be weighed against the amount of disgust and annoyance occasioned by the inquisitorial insolence of the harpies of Calais and Boulogne. Upon the other hand, and not to blink our own faults whilst dwelling upon those of our neighbours, nothing can be more barbarous than to condemn travellers arriving in London on a Sunday, after a rough passage from the French or Flemish, Dutch or German coast, to pass fourand-twenty hours deprived of their baggage, and, as often happens in the case of foreigners in England for the first time, without even the change of linen, brush, and razor, which they would be suffered to take ashore in a carpet-bag.

To return, however, to Mr Wey. On arriving at the Leicester Square caravanserai, where foreigners are accustomed to take refuge from the extravagant charges of native hotels, the excursionists were for sallying forth at once. They took possession of the guides, and rushed into the street in a body, gesticulating, talking loud, and attracting the attention of the passers-by. Deserting for a while their noisy society, Mr Wey proceeded alone to the National Gallery. He is very severe, but not unjustly so, upon Trafalgar Square, its buildings, arrangements, and monuments. Whilst praising the architecture of London's streets and squares, he is pitiless with respect to that of its public edifices. "The Englishman,” he says, with much show of reason, "thoroughly understands only the comfort of his interior. Certain splendid quarters, such as Portland Place and Belgrave Square, inhabited by private persons, are assemblages of palaces. Public buildings are in general less appropriate. Nothing can be more marked than this insufficiency in the case of the National Gallery-a meagre, cramped edifice, out of proportion, badly lighted, and surmounted by a little dome, which looks like a jockey-cap forgotten on a platform. It wants entirely rebuilding; it is not even large enough to accommodate the sculpture-and the two hundred and fourteen pictures it contains are crowded and badly hung." He blames the building and its arrangements, but greatly lauds the

pictures, many of which he names and criticises. Of the English painters whose works are there exhibited, he sets down Angelica Kauffmann, Lawrence, Wilkie, Reynolds, and Wilson, as artists of merit and talent; but in Hogarth he recognises and admires a great genius, and speaks of him with enthusiasm. "William Hogarth," he says, "is too little known in France. He is a great artist, having a style of his own, and an incomparable art of composition. His touch is bold, significant, and free

his colouring vivid—and his brush as pliant as his wit is subtle and acute. Hogarth is the first of thoughtful and moralising painters. He has no master but Shakespeare. Wilkie is but the moonlight of William Hogarth." The words we have italicised are a happy touch of criticism. When Borrow's Spanish adventures were published, a critic spoke of the book as a Gil Blas in water - colours. The figures of speech are of the same family. Hereabouts Mr Wey was rejoined by the excursionists-an end, for that day, to quiet examination. They had scarcely entered, when they wished to depart. "We have not come to London to see pictures," quoth one,

66

we have plenty of those at the Louvre." And, whilst tumultuously departing, they said to each other

These English know nothing of art; it is a pity!-how different from France! There is not a picture worth sixpence in the whole gallery." Mr Wey amends his countrymen's ignorant verdict: "The National Gallery of London," he says, "is a precious jewel set in copper.' A true enough definition, whose giver, faithful to his plan of passing his first week with his countrymen, and rattling through London's sights, allows himself to be dragged, full speed, to an endless variety of places, observing, however, upon the way, various things worth noting which escape his bustling and impatient companions. The beefeaters at the Tower greatly divert him. "Do you recollect," he says, "the dress of Tyrrel, in Les Enfans d'Edouard? It is that of the guardians of the Tower of London: a square hat, adorned with a feather; dagger on hip; scarlet petticoat and jacket, clasping behind, with the arms