Part 18

My sepulchral tour is now nearly finished: we have in the course of this journey seen the last remains of many a celebrated mortal. Virgil, Raphael, Ariosto, Scipio, Galileo, Petrarch, Carlo Borromeo, and the king of Prussia. How different each from other in his life! How like each other now! But

Tous ces morts ont vecu; toi qui lis--tu mourras: L’instant fatal approche, et tu n’y pense pas[53].

I could have wished before my return to have paused a moment on the tomb of Melancthon, who might be said to have united in himself _their_ separate perfections. Courage, genius, moderation, piety! persevering steadiness in the right way himself; candid acknowledgment of merit, even in his enemies, where he saw their intentions right, though he thought their tenets and their conduct wrong. But we are removed far from the dwelling of the _peacemaker_; let us at least look at the palace, now we have examined the coffin of him whose study and delight was _war_.

Sans Souci is surely an elegantly chosen spot, its architecture excellent, its furniture rich yet delicate, the gardens very happily disposed, the prospect from its windows agreeable, the pictures within an admirable collection. A hall built in imitation of the Colonna gallery shews Frederick’s taste at once and liberal spirit: the front seems borrowed from something at St. Peter’s; all is beautiful; the gilding of his long-room makes a very sudden and strong effect, nor are marbles of immense value wanting; here is a specimen of every thing I think, and two agate tables of prodigious size and beauty. The Silesian chrysopaz, and Carolina marble of a bright scarlet colour, quite luminous like the feathers of a fighting cock, struck me with their singular and splendid appearance. Rubens’s merit was not new to me, I hope; yet here is a resurrection of Lazarus, in which he has been lavish of it. The composition of this picture seems to have been intended to surpass every thing put together by other artists: its colouring glows like life.

The king’s town-house, however, is finer far than this his villa was designed to be; but I grew very tired walking over it: when one has dragged through twenty-four rooms variously hung with pink and silver, green and gold, &c. one grows cruelly weary with repeating the same ideas by drawling through forty-eight more. I wished to see his own private living apartments, and to mind with what books and pictures he adorned the dressing-room he always sate in: the first were chiefly works of Voltaire and Metastasio--the last were small landscapes of Albano and Watteau. At our desire they shewed us the little bed he slept, the chairs he sate in familiarly. Suetonius in French and Italian was the last author he looked into; they have made a mark at the death of Augustus, where he was reading when the same visitant called on him, quite unexpected by himself it seems, though all his attendants were well aware of his approach. As he expired he said, _I give you a vast deal of trouble_. We saw the spot he sate in at the moment; for Frederick no more died in his bed, than did the famous Flavius Vespasian; his servants wept as they repeated the particulars, caressing while they spoke his favourite dogs, one of which, a terrier, could hardly be prevailed upon to quit the body. It used to amuse the king to see them frighted when he would take them to a long room lined with French mirrors, which he did now and then to laugh at the effect.

Every thing at Potzdam shews a man in haste to enjoy what he had laboured so hard to procure; nor did he ever refuse himself, they say, any gratification that could make age less wearisome, or illness less afflictive. He had much taste of English ingenuity--combinations of convenience, and improvements in mechanism: his own writing-table, however, was contrived by himself; it stands on four legs, one pair longer than the other to make it slope; the covering is green velvet, with a square hole for the standish to drop in and not spill the ink: I liked the device exceedingly, but wondered he thought any device worth his preference. His conversation to his servants was affable and even gay; they loved his person, it is plain, and half adore his memory.

Such were the manners then, and such the death, of the far-famed philosopher of Sans Souci! And in truth, when he had so often set all present and future happiness to hazard, it would have been inconsistent not to hasten the enjoyment: nobody comes to inhabit his fine town, however, which has much the look of buildings in a stage perspective. Soldiers only, and such as sell wares necessary to soldiers, were all the human creatures I could see here; nor are families, or travellers of any sort indeed, better accommodated here than at inns of less pompous appearance on the outside.

For accommodations, however, I care but little; I have now walked over the oldest and the youngest cities in all Europe, and have left each with sincere admiration of their contents. Both are full of buildings and empty of inhabitants, nor am I desirous to add to the number in either. I was going to step forward into some room of the palace yesterday--“Madam, come back this instant,” exclaimed our Cicerone; “if that chamber is entered, my head will be off my shoulders in three days time.” Another well attested anecdote may be worth relating: A gentleman with whom we passed an agreeable evening at Berlin, whose lady invited to meet us whatever was most charming in the town, told the following story of a soldier who, being desirous of his body’s dissolution, but fearful of his soul’s rushing unprepared into eternity, caught and murdered a six months old baby; giving this strange account of his own feelings on the occasion, and adding, that he did not like to kill an adult, lest his own impatience of life’s insupportable torment might by that means precipitate his neighbour to perdition; but that a baptized infant would be sure of heaven, and he himself should gain time to prepare for following it--“And, Lord!” said my informer, “what reasoners this world has in it!” The soldier was hanged six weeks after the dreadful crime was committed; he made a very decent and penitential end.

On such facts what observations or reflections can result? I made none, but gave God thanks that I was born a subject of Great Britain.

POTZDAM TO HANOVER.

On the 13th of January 1787 then we quitted Potzdam, strongly impressed by the beauties of a town apparently fabricated by a modern Cadmus, who, when all the soldiers that he could _raise_ were fallen in _battle_ for his amusement, retired with the five that were left, and built a fine city!

Brandenbourg was our next resting place, and seemed to me to merit a longer stay in it; I saw an old Runick figure in the street, its size colossal, and its composition seemed black basalt; but of this I could obtain no account for want of language, our still recurring torment.--This place seems fuller of inhabitants than the last; but it is _so_ melancholy to have no compensation for the fatigues of a tedious journey! and in these countries information cannot be procured for travellers that do not mean to reside, present letters, &c.; which task we have at this season little taste to renew.

Magdebourg makes a respectable appearance at a distance, from the loftiness of its turrets; one sees them at least four long hours before the roads which lead to it permit one’s approach; and the towers seem to retire before one, like Ulysses’s fictitious country raised to deceive him. Never was I so weary in my life as when we entered Magdebourg, where, instead of going out to see sights as usual, I desired nothing so sincerely as a hot supper and soft bed, which the inns of Germany never fail to afford us in even elegant perfection.

Our linen too, so beautifully, and I will add so unnecessarily fine! The king of Naples probably never saw such sheets and table-cloths as we have been comforted with here, not only at Dresden, but every post since.

Magdebourg seems to have almost all its streets united by bridges; the Elbe divides there into so many branches, and none of them small.

Helmstadt is a little place which affords few images to the mind, and Brunswick to mere passengers, as we were, seemed to yield none but sad ones. The houses all of wood, even to prince Ferdinand’s palace, and painted of a dull olive colour with heavy pensile roofs, giving the town a melancholy look; but we met with young Englishmen who commended the society, and said no place could be gayer than Brunswick. This is among the reports one wishes to be true, and we are led the more willingly to believe them.

Another delight which I enjoyed at this city was, to find that every body in it, and every body passing through it, adored the duchess, whose partial fondness, and tender remembrance of her native country, justly endears her name to every subject of Great Britain. Her chapel is pretty; the garden, where they said she always walked two hours every day, put me in mind of Gray’s-Inn walks twenty or thirty years ago; they were then very like it.

From these scenes of solitude without retirement, and of age without antiquity, I was willing enough to be gone; but they would shew me one curiosity they said, as I seemed to feel particular pleasure in speaking of their charming duchess. We followed, and were shewn _her coffin!_ all in silver, finely carved, chased, engraved, what you will. “Before she is dead!” exclaimed I--“Before she was even married, madam,” replied our Cicerone; “it is the very finest ever made in Brunswick; we had it ready for her against she came home to us, and you see the plate left vacant for her age.” I was glad to drive forward now, and slept at Peina; which, though in itself a miserable place, exhibits one consolatory sight for a Christian--the sight of toleration. Here Romanists, Lutherans, and Calvinists, live all affectionately and quietly together, under the protection of the bishop of Paderborne; and here I first saw the king of England’s livery upon the king of England’s servants since I left home--“And if they _are_ ragged youngsters who wear it,” said I, “they are my fellow-subjects, and glad am I to see them!”

The villages and churches hereabouts resemble those of Merionethshire, only that not a mountain rears its head at all--one vast, wide, barren flat, through which roads that no weather can render better than barely passable brought us at length to Hanover, which stands, as all these cities do in the north of Germany, upon an immense plain, with a thick wood of noble timber trees breaking from time to time the almost boundless void, and relieving the eye, which is fatigued by extent without any object to repose upon, in a manner I can with difficulty comprehend, much less explain; but the sight of a passing waggon, or distant spire, is a felicity seldom found, though continually sought by me, while travelling through these wide wasted countries, where no idea is afforded to the imagination, no image remitted to the mind, but that of two armies encountering each other, to dispute the plunder of some place already unable to feed its few inhabitants.

The horses however are exceedingly beautiful; we were offered a pair of very fine ones for only forty pounds. They would have run such hazards getting home! “There are two ways to chuse out of,” said I; “if we purchase them, we shall repent on it every day till we arrive in London; if we do not, we shall repent on it every day after we get there.” Such is life! we did not buy the cattle.

The cleanliness of the windows, the manner of paving and lighting the streets at Hanover, put us in mind a little of some country towns in the remoter provinces of England; and there seems to be likewise a little glimpse of British manners, dress, &c. breaking through the common and natural fashions of the country. This was very pleasing to us, but I wished the place grander; I do not very well know why, but we had long counted on comforts here as at home, and I had formed expectations of something much more magnificent than we found; though the Duke of York’s residence does give the town an air of cheerfulness it scarce could shew without that advantage; and here are concerts and balls, and efforts at being gay, which may probably succeed sometime. How did all the talk however, and all the pamphlets, and all the lamentations made by old King George’s new subjects, rush into my mind, when I recollected the loud, illiberal, and indecent clamours made from the year 1720 to the year 1750, at least till the alarm given by the Rebellion began to operate, and open people’s eyes to the virtues of the reigning family! for till then, no topic had so completely engrossed both press and conversation, as the misfortunes accruing to _poor_ old England, from their King’s desire of enriching his Electoral dominions, and feeding his favourite Hanoverians with their good guineas, making fat the objects of his partial tenderness with their best treasures--in good time! Such groundless charges remind one of a story the famous French wit Monsieur de Menage tells of his mother and her maid, who, having wasted or sold a pound of butter, laid the theft upon the _cat_, persisting so violently that it had been all devoured by the rapacious favourite, that Madame de Menage said, “It’s very well; we will weigh the cat, poor thing! and know the truth:” The scales were produced, but puss could be found to weigh only _three quarters_, after all her depredations.

FROM HANOVER TO BRUSSELS.

Travelling night and day through the most dismal country I ever yet beheld, brought us at length to Munster, where we had a good inn again, and talked English. Well may all our writers agree in celebrating the miseries of Westphalia! well may they, while the wretched inhabitants, uniting poverty with pride, live on their hogs, with their hogs, and like their hogs, in mud-walled cottages, a dozen of which together is called by courtesy a village, surrounded by black heaths, and wild uncultivated plains, over which the unresisted wind sweeps with a velocity I never yet was witness to, and now and then, exasperated perhaps by solitude, returns upon itself in eddies terrible to look on. Well, the woes of mortal man are chiefly his own fault; war and ambition have depopulated the country, which otherwise need not I believe be poor, as here is capability enough, and the weather, though stormy, is not otherwise particularly disagreeable. January is no mild month any where; even Naples, so proverbially delicious, is noisy enough with thunder and lightning; and the torrents of rain which often fall at this season at Rome and Florence, make them unpleasing enough. Nor do I believe that the _very_ few people one finds here are of a lazy disposition at all; but it is so seldom that one meets with the _human face divine_ in this Western side of Germany, that one scarce knows what they are, but by report.

The town of Munster is catholic I see; their cathedral heavily and clumsily adorned, like the old Lutheran church called Santa Sophia at Dresden. One pair of their silver candlesticks however are eight feet high, and exhibit more solidity than elegance. They told us something about the _three kings_, who must have lost their way amazingly if ever they wandered into Westphalia, and deserved to lose their name of _wise men_ too, I think. We were likewise shewn the sword worn by St. Paul, they told us, and a backgammon table preserved behind the high altar, I could not for, my life find out why; at first our interpreter told us, that the man said it had belonged to _John the Baptist_, but on further enquiry we understood him that it was once used by some Anabaptists; as that seemed no less wild a reason for keeping it there, than the other seemed as an account of its original, we came away uninformed.

Of the reason why Hams are better here than in any other part of Europe, it was not so difficult to obtain the knowledge, and the inquiry was much more useful.

Poor people here burn a vast quantity of very fine old oak in their cottages, which, having no chimney, detain the smoke a long time before it makes its escape out at the door. This smoke gives the peculiar flavour to that bacon which hangs from the roof, already fat with the produce of the same tree growing about these districts in a plenty not to be believed. Indeed the sole decoration of this devasted country is the large quantity of majestic timber trees, almost all oak, living to such an age, and spreading their broad arms with such venerable dignity, that it is _they_ who appear the ancient possessors of the land, who, in the true style of Gothic supremacy, suck all the nutriment of it to themselves, only shaking off a few acorns to content the immediate hunger of the animal race, which here seems in a state of great degeneracy indeed, compared to those haughty vegetables.

This day I saw a fryar; the first that has crossed my sight since we left the town of Munich in Bavaria. On the road to Dusseldorp one sees the country mend at every step; but even _I_ can perceive the language harsher, the further one is removed from Hanover on either side: for Hanover, as Madame de Bianconi told me at Dresden, is the Florence of Germany; and the tongue spoken at that town is supposed, and justly, the criterion of perfect _Teutsch_.

The gallery of paintings here shall delay us but two or three days; I am so very weary of living on the high roads of _Teuchland_ all winter long! Gerard Dow’s delightful mountebank ought, however, to have two of those days devoted to him, and here is the most capital Teniers which the world has to show. Jaques Jordaens never painted any thing so well as the feast in this gallery, where there are likewise some wonderful Sckalkens; besides Rembrandt’s portrait of himself much out of repair, and old Franck’s Seven Acts of Mercy varnished up, as well as the martyrdoms representing some of the persecutions in early times of Christianity; these might be called the Seven Acts of Cruelty--a duplicate of the picture may be seen at Vienna. When one has mentioned the Vanderwerfs, which are all sisters, and the demi-divine Carlo Dolce in the window, representing the infant Jesus with flowers, full of sweetness and innocent expression, it will be time to talk of the General Judgment, painted with astonishing hardihood by Rubens, and which we stopt here chiefly to see. The second Person of the Trinity is truly sublime, and formed upon an idea more worthy of him, at least more correspondent to the general ideas than that in Cappella Sestini; where a beholder is tempted to think on Julius Cæsar somehow, instead of Jesus Christ--a Conqueror, more than a Saviour of mankind.

St. Michael’s figure is incomparable; those of Moses and St. Peter happily imagined; the spirit of composition, the manner of grouping and colouring, the general effect of the whole, prodigious! I know not why he has so fallen below himself in the Madonna’s character; perhaps not imitating Tintoret’s lovely Virgin in Paradise, he has done worse for fear of being servile. Tintoret’s idea of her is so _very_ poetical! but those who shewed it me at Venice said the drawing was borrowed from Guariento, I remember.

Who however except Rubens would have thought so justly, so liberally, so wisely, about the Negro drawn up to heaven by the angels? who still retains the old terrestrial character, so far as to shew a disposition to laugh at _their_ situation who on earth tormented him. When all is said, every body knows very well that Michael Angelo’s picture on this subject is by far the finest; and that neither Rubens nor Tintoret ever pretended, or even hoped to be thought as great artists as he: but though Dante is a sublimer poet than Tasso, and Milton a writer of more eminence than Pope, _these_ last will have readers, reciters, and quoters, while the others must sit down contented with silent veneration and acknowledged superiority.

This day we saw the Rhine--what rivers these are! and what enormous inhabitants they do contain! a brace of bream, and eels of a magnitude and flavour very uncommon except in Germany, were our supper here. But the manners begin I see to fade away upon the borders; our soft feather beds are left behind; men too, sometimes sad, nasty, ill-looked fellows, come in one’s room to sweep, &c. and light the fire in the stove, which is now always made of lead, and the fumes are very offensive; no more tight maids to be seen: but we shall get good roads; at Liege, down in a dirty coal pit, the bad ones end I think; and that town may be said to finish all our difficulties. After passing through our last disagreeable resting-place then, one finds the manners take a tint of France, and begins to see again what one has often seen before. The forests too are fairly left behind, but neat agriculture, and comfortable cottages more than supply their loss. Broom, juniper, every English shrub, announce our proximity to Great Britain, while pots of mazerion in flower at the windows shew that we are arrived in a country where spring is welcomed with ceremony, as well as received with delight. The forwardness of the season is indeed surprising; though it freezes at night now and then, the general feel of the air is very mild; willows already give signs of resuscitation, while flights of yellowhammers, a bird never observed in Italy I think, enliven the fields, and look as if they expected food and felicity to be near.

Louvaine would have been a place well worth stopping at, they tell me; but we were in haste to finish our journey and arrive at

BRUSSELS.