for any conceivable rank or fortune, or authority in Modena? How much of my nature must I surrender; how many faculties must consent to abandon their exercise before the change could be other than intolerable! Feeling this, one can understand the Spartan answer to the Great King's satrap, "Hadst thou known what freedom was, thou wouldst advise us to defend it not with swords, but with axes." Now there are some, Englishmen unhappily, but most unworthy to be so, who affect to talk of freedom, and a citizen's rights and duties, as things about which a Christian should not care. Like all their other doctrines, this comes out of the shallowness of their little minds, "understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm." True it is, that St. Paul, expecting that the world was shortly to end, tells a man not to care even if he were in a state of personal slavery. That is an endurable evil which will shortly cease, not in itself only, but in its consequences. But even for the few years during which he supposed the world would exist, he says, "if thou mayest be made free, use it rather." For true it is that a great part of the virtues of human nature can scarcely be developed in a state of slavery, whether personal or political. The passive virtues may exist, the active ones suffer. Truth, too, suffers especially; if a man may not declare his convictions when he wishes to do so, he learns to conceal them also for his own convenience; from being obliged to play the hypocrite for others, he learns to lie on his own account. And as the ceasing to lie is mentioned by St. Paul, as one of the first marks of the renewed nature, so the learning to lie is one of the surest marks of nature unrenewed. ... .. True it is, that the first Christians lived under a despotism, and yet that truth and the active virtues were admirably developed in them. But the first manifestation of Christianity was in all respects of a character so extraordinary as abundantly to make up for the absence of more ordinary instruments for the elevation of the human mind. It is more to the pur pose to observe, that immediately after the Apostolic times, the total absence of all civil self-government was one great cause which ruined the government of the Church also, and prepared men for the abominations of the priestly dominion; while on the other hand Guizot has well shown that one great cause of the superiority of the Church to the heathen world, was because in the Church alone there was a degree of freedom and a semblance of political activity; the great bishops, Athanasius and Augustine, although subjects of a despotic ruler in the State, were themselves free citizens and rulers of a great society, in the management of which all the political faculties of the human mind found sufficient exercise. But when the Church is lost in the weakness and falsehood of a Priesthood, it can no longer furnish such a field, and there is the greater need therefore of political freedom. But the only perfect and entirely wholesome freedom, is where the Church and the State are both free, and both one. Then, indeed, there is Civitas Dei, then there is agíoτn nai TEXELοτάτη πολίτεια. And now this discussion has brought me nearly half through this Duchy of Modena, for we must be more than half way from Rubbiera to Reggio. July 28, 1840. 17. Left Amsteg, 6.50. The beauty of the lower part of this valley is perfect. The morning is fine, so that we see the tops of the mountains, which rise 9000 feet above the sea directly from the valley. Huge precipices, crowned with pines, rising out of pines, and with pines between them, succeed below to the crags and glaciers. Then in the valley itself, green hows, with walnuts and pears, and wild cherries, and the gardens of these picturesque Swiss cottages, scattered about over them; and the roaring Reuss, the only inharmonious element where he is,-yet he himself not incapable of being made harmonious if taken in a certain point of view, at the very bottom of all. This is the Canton Uri, one of the Wald Staaten or Forest Cantons, which were the original germ of the Swiss Confede racy. But Uri, like Sparta, has to answer the question, what has mankind gained over and above the ever precious example of noble deeds, from Murgarten, Sempach, or Thermopylæ. What the world has gained by Salamis and Platea, and by Zama, is on the other hand no question, any more than it ought to be a question what the world has gained by the defeat of Philip's armada, or by Trafalgar and Waterloo. But if a nation only does great deeds that it may live, and does not show some worthy object for which it has lived, and Uri and Switzerland have shown but too little of any such, then our sympathy with the great deeds of their history can hardly go beyond the generation by which those deeds were performed; and I cannot help thinking of the mercenary Swiss of Novara and Marignano, and of the oppression exercised over the Italian bailiwicks and the Pays de Vaud, and all the tyrannical exclusiveness of these little barren oligarchies, as much as of the heroic deeds of the three men, Tell and his comrades, or of the self-devotion of my namesake of Winkelried, when at Sempach he received into his breast "a sheaf of Austrian spears." Steamer on the Lake of Luzern, July 29, 1840. 18. We arrived at Fluelen about half-past eight, and having had some food, and most commendable food it was, we are embarked on the Lake of Luzern, and have already passed Brünnen, and are outside the region of the high Alps. It would be difficult certainly for a Swiss to admire our lakes, because he would ask, what is there here which we have not, and which we have not on a larger scale. I cannot deny that the meadows here are as green as ours, the valleys richer, the woods thicker, the cliffs grander, the mountains by measurement twice or three times higher. And if Switzerland were my home and country, the English lakes and mountains would certainly never tempt me to travel to see them, destitute as they are of all historical interest. In fact, Switzerland is to Europe, what Cum berland and Westmoreland are to Lancashire and Yorkshire; the general summer touring place. But all country that is actually beautiful, is capable of affording to those who live in it the highest pleasure of scenery, which no country, however beautiful, can do to those who merely travel in it; and thus, while I do not dispute the higher interest of Switzerland to a Swiss, (no Englishman ought to make another country his home, and therefore I do not speak of Englishmen,) I must still maintain that to me Fairfield is a hundred times more beautiful than the Rhigi, and Windermere than the Lake of the Four Cantons. Not that I think this is overvalued by travellers, it cannot be so; but most people undervalue greatly what mountains are when they form a part of our daily life, and combine not with our hours of leisure, of wandering, and of enjoyment, but with those of home life, of work and of duty. Luzern, July 29. We accomplished the passage of the lake in about three hours, and most beautiful it was all the way. And now, as in 1827, I recognise the forms of our common English country, and should be bidding adieu to mountains, and preparing merely for our Rugby lanes and banks, and Rugby work, were it not for the delightful excrescence of a tour which we hope to make to Fox How, and three or four days' enjoyment of our own mountains, hallowed by our English Church, and hallowed scarcely less by our English Law. Alas, the difference between Church and Law, and clergy and lawyers; but so in human things the concrete ever adds unworthiness to the abstract. I have been sure for many years that the subsiding of a tour, if I may so speak, is quite as delightful as its swelling; I call it its subsiding, when one passes by common things indifferently, and even great things with a fainter interest, because one is so strongly thinking of home and of the returning to ordinary relations and duties. August 6, 1840. 19. Arrived at St. Omer.-And Pavé is dead, and we have left our last French town except Calais, and all things and feelings French seem going to sleep in me,-cares of carriage-cares of passport-cares of inns-cares of postillions and of Pavé, and there revive within me the habitual cares of my life, which for the last seven weeks have slumbered. In many things the beginning and end are different, in few more so than in a tour. "Cœlum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt," is in my case doubly false. My mind changes twice, from my home self to my travelling self, and then to my home self back again. On this day seven weeks I travelled this very stage; its appearance in that interval is no doubt altered; flowers are gone by, and corn is yellow which was green; but I am changed even more-changed in my appetites and in my impressions; for then I craved locomotion and rest from mental work-now I desire to remain still as to place, and to set my mind to work again;-then I looked at every thing on the road with interest, drinking in eagerly a sense of the reality of foreign objects-now I only notice our advance homeward, and foreign objects seem to be things with which I have no concern. But it is not that I feel any way tired of things and persons French, only that I do so long for things and persons English. I never felt more keenly the wish to see the peace between the two countries perpetual; never could I be more indignant at the folly and wickedness which on both sides of the water are trying to rekindle the flames of war. The one effect of the last war ought to be to excite in both nations the greatest mutual respect. France, with the aid of half Europe, could not conquer England; England, with the aid of all Europe, never could have overcome France, had France been zealous and united in Napoleon's quarrel, When Napoleon saw kings and princes bowing before him at Dresden, Wellington was advancing victoriously in Spain; when a million of men in 1815 were invading VOL. II, E E |