fates have allowed you twelve, instead of three hundred a year, and if they have either kept you out of the treacherous Corrievreckan of matrimony altogether, or blessed you with a fair and gentle being, who has happily not yet begun to shew any symptoms of having over-prolific tendencies, then you are a freer and a much more to be envied man; and a far wider range is within your choice.

Perhaps you may wish to visit France?-Sunny France! we know thee thoroughly; and now that Bonaparte is dead, and his flat-bottomed boats are no longer in the harbour of Boulogne, and that England is thy sister-not thy foe- we care not though we tell thee that we love thee passing well. It was in the early part of the year 1819 that we first sailed from Ramsgate to Ostend, to visit thee. We took a short peep into the Netherlands and Holland, and came back to thee by the way of Rouen. On a delightful morning in May we crossed the floating bridge at that city, and gained the heights on the left bank of the Seine. We shall be dead to every feeling of the beautiful in nature, when we forget the view which then burst upon us, a catalogue of whose leading features would convey no idea of the picture as a whole, nor enable the reader to understand how finely the majestic river, flowing through an expansive valley, whose woods and fields smiled in the luxu

our voiture, to Orleans, Nevers, and Moulins, till we joined the "arrowy Rhone" at Lyons, where it is no more "arrowy" than the Tweed is at Peebles, or the Thames at Richmond. Down the Rhone we went to Avignon, then away south by Montpelier to Toulouse, and then into the Hautes Pyrenees, where we saw, from the summit of the Pic du Midi, the far-off ocean, the shining and winding Garonne, and that noble amphitheatrical chain of mountains which stretch away towards the frontiers of Spain. Our road homewards lay through Bourdeaux, Poitiers, Tours, Alençon, Caen, and Havre-de-Grace. This was our first continental summer, and we shall never spend such a summer again in this unsatisfactory world. It was all one gleam of sunshine, for it was at a period when our heart was easily touched, and our feelings quickly awakened. No wonder we love the ancestral woods and chateaux of the Saone and Loire, of Vaucluse and Dordogne! No wonder that the lovely scenes of Guienne, and Anjou, and pastoral Normandy, still come back to us through the vista of years!

Perhaps you may wish to visit Switzerland? Your soul may long with a deep longing for the

Alps, the Simplon, and the Glaciers,

for one intense gaze on the Rhine, Geneva, and Lucerne, one glorious ramble through Clarens and Lausanne. Then take with you Wall's new edition of Ebel's Guide through Switzerland, and you may safely plunge away into the abysses of the Julian, Noric, Carnic, Rhetian, and Helvetic Alps. If you are lost in the Canton of Zug, or frozen to death, on the 22nd of July, on St. Gothard, or get yourself jammed in, as we once did for three hours, in the entrance to the Grotto of Balme, or slip through a cleft of the Glaciers, or tumble over the Devil's Bridge, it must be your own fault. Besides, your death will be a picturesque one, and ten to one that you will ever be missed. The number of tourists who are swallowed up by avalanches, or who fall over icy precipices every year in Switzerland, is immense; and, on the whole, it is an easy and desirable mode of death. Look at that pic-nic party, for example, consisting of one or two chatty elderly ladies, with their wellfed, good-natured-looking husbands-old baronets, perhaps, and shareholders in a respectable banking establishment in London, fat and comfortable, their daughters, and their daughters' friends, their sons, and their sons' friends,- the young ladies all very gay in white satin bonnets, pelerins, and parasols; and the young gentlemen exceedingly smart, each in a fashionable summer

costume ;—well, this pic-nic party having selected a delightful spot to spread their table-cloth in the valley of Grindelwald, and having produced their cold fowls and their Johannisberg, are quite enraptured with the surrounding scenery, and prodigiously hungry, and all very witty; and Master Augustus Fitzbubble is in the very act of pulling a merry-thought with Miss Celestina Amelia Nibbs, when a queer sort of noise is heard above on the Shreck horn. Every body looks up; but, just as they look up, down comes an avalanche or a bit of a glacier! and in one moment the chatty elderly ladies are no more; and the worthy baronets, rather inclining to be roundbellied, are as flat as pancakes, and not a whit liker baronets than they are like beer barrels: and the young ladies in the white satin bonnets, and the young gentlemen, each in a fashionable summer costume, are all as completely dead, and as unlike humanity as if they had lain in the earth a hundred years, and Master Augustus Fitzbubble and Miss Celestina Amelia Nibbs, are, in every human probability, still grasping the chicken's merry-thought, twenty fathoms down under the mountainous mass of ice; and of all the pic-nic party, nothing now is visible but a single blue plate, containing a small slice of cold tongue, which, by some unaccountable mystery, has escaped untouched! Yet there are the Shreckhorn,

and the Wetterhorn, and the Mettenberg, still lifting calmly their sunny peaks far into the blue sky, and looking perfectly innocent and unconscious of the catastrophe which has taken place. And why should they not? Is it not as well that our pic-nic party has died in the valley of the Grindelwald as of a set of painful and lingering diseases in their respective beds? On the whole, we envy the fate of Master Augustus Fitzbubble. It was, at all events, preferable to that of a young and ambitious poet, who had already distinguished himself in many a lady's album, and who, as he walked along the Jungfrau, was in the very act of composing something delightful, when he stepped over a precipice, and had just time to wonder what he had done with himself, before he was dashed into fragments, like the wave of a descending cataract.

The

consequence was, that he never wrote another line in a lady's album.

Perhaps you may wish to visit Italy? By all means! Off with you instantly! But for Heaven's sake do not go to Italy simply to see sights -to yawn through all the hackneyed routine of wonder and admiration, and, like the Sybarite who was smothered in roses, to kill yourself with the fatigue of pleasurable emotions,-afterwards to be dragged, an inanimate corpse, at the tail of a parrot-tongued cicerone. Enter Italy with your own well-stored mind-your own free thoughts.