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single sentence, we could hang a dissertation; and at some future period, we may favour our readers with one; but we must now pass on.

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The rising of the people of Hamburgh against the French was one of the most interesting incidents of the war. The present Writer has described it as he saw it; with the opportunities of one on the spot, and the fresh impressions of the moment; impressions heightened, rather than diminished, by the twenty years which have since been interposed. He has found no record of the transactions from the native pen; and he has long felt an allowable anxiety that some memorial should exist of a public effort, which exhibited all the essential features of public virtue. The general aspect of German affairs at the time will be found occasionally observed.'

The first chapter introduces us to a groupe of characters on board the packet, sketched with a vigour and humour that just stop short of caricature, and make the week's voyage, which lasts the chapter, not seem tedious. Heliogoland is the subject of Chapter II.; and we must insert the graphic description of this singular outpost of the Continent.

The North Sea was angry, and a whole wilderness of immense waves, topped with yellow, bilious-looking foam, rolled furiously towards the little half-drowned island which continually escaped from us, and seemed as if it were swimming away for its life. But, rough as the gale was, it was luckily in our favour. We were hurled along like the foam itself, and, in the course of a few hours, we were abreast of the beach. The scene there was a very curious and peculiar one. All seemed on the smallest scale, and might have been sketched for Gulliver's first view of Lilliput. Heligoland is probably the smallest spot to which human life, adhesive as it is, ever thought of clinging.. Like every other nook of this over-travelled world, it has long since lost its ancient spell; but it was then a novelty, and an extremely characteristic one. Paley should have put it into his chapter of "Contrivances." It was impossible to look upon it without recognizing the original design of nature for the intercourse of nations; the Plymouth Breakwater, or the Eddystone lighthouse, is not a clearer evidence of intention. Though it has stood from the creation or the deluge, a solitary point in the deep, the playground of the seamew and the porpoise for some thousand years, it was yet as obviously placed for the uses of human kind, when the low shores of Holstein and Hanover should be peopled, as if it had been piled by a Telford or a Rennie before our eyes. Standing about twenty-five miles from the mouth of the Elbe, it is seen at the exact distance sufficient for ships to make the land, without being entangled in the shoals which line the whole shore of Germany; its very form is that of the pedestal of a light-house; and many a storm-tost blaze must have flared from it to the squadrons with which Denmark and Sweden first paid such formidable visits to their more opulent neighbours of Germany and England.

Its population, time out of mind, have been pilots; and even in its

name of "Holy Island," there may be found some reference to the sailor's gratitude for his preservation. But things had now, in the American phrase, prodigiously progressed; for the pedestal was not merely topped with a huge light-house, glittering with reflectors and all the improvements of modern art, but it was enjoying that peculiar prosperity which, according to the proverb, in the worst of times, falls somewhere; and being the first mark of all vessels bound for the Elbe, and just out of the reach of Napoleon's talons besides, it had become a grand depot of commerce; or, to use a less dignified, but truer appellation, of smuggling of the most barefaced kind. Every spot was crowded with clerks and agents from England and Germany; many of them not improbably agents of more important concerns than the barter of sugar and coffee; for those were times when every feeling of right, seconded by every dexterity of man, was concerting the fall of the great enemy; and Heligoland was, perhaps, more nearly connected with Vienna, and even with Paris, than half the cabinets alive.

'But all before us, was the merchant and his merchandize, bales of Manchester manufactures and bags of West India produce, and among them the busy Englishman stalking about, and the spectacled German following him, and each apparently too well employed to think of the fates of empires.

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From our deck, the beach, which looked scarcely more than a hundred yards wide; and the rock itself, which did not seem half the number of feet high, gave the thickest picture of human swarming, that I had ever seen; the whole was black, restless, and buzzing with life; it had the look of an immense beehive.' pp. 20—24.

It blows a storm; and every wave that rolls in upon the little beach threatens to wreck our whole navy at its anchors. The man who "pitied idle gentlemen upon a rainy day," should have added to the rainy day, confinement upon an island a mile round, as flat as a bowling-green, and with nothing upon it but a gathering of crazy huts, shaking in every limb, groaning in the wind as if they were groaning their last, and making it a doubtful point, whether it were wiser to take the chance of being swept into the sea with them, or without them.

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'But the sea is magnificent: I now feel, for the first time, the full force of the words, "the wilderness of waves. As far as the eye can reach, the whole horizon is one moving mass of billows, rolling, foaming, and thundering on each other; sheets of spray suddenly caught up and whirling to vast distances, like the banners of the host of waters. Here are no chains of rock to fret the waves, no projections and promontories to break their mass, no distractions of the eye by the mixture of land and water: all is ocean, deep, dreary, and illimitable. With such an object before the poets of the north, well might they fill their imaginations with shapes of desolate power. Among the clouds which come continually rolling along the horizon, and almost touching the waters, it would be no difficult fancy even now, to conceive some of the old pirate fleets, spreading sail from the Baltic, and sweeping down, with the lightning for their pilot, and the winds for their trump, to the spoil of Europe. All is wild, melancholy, and grand.'

Vol. I. pp. 36-33.

The

We must not stop to discuss the point, how far Napoleon's downfall may be ascribed to the Berlin and Milan decrees. Writer asserts, that their first effect was, the ruin of his own resources. The blow aimed at England, fell on Germany, which had hitherto fed the French exchequer, and instantly cut off the conduit through which the German revenues had flowed into France. A more formidable result was, that the whole mind of the Continent' was at once exasperated against him.

Napoleon might have galloped his charger over Europe, making her castles the dust of its hoofs to the last of his days, but for his forgetting the spell which, more than cannon or bayonet, fought for the Republic; the "Guerre aux palais, paix aux cabanes". He had now fallen on the cabanes, and from that moment he was undone. The nations, long discontented with their sovereigns, had seen him trampling them down, and never moved a muscle. But, when they found his heel pressing on the neck of every man alike, they sprang up crushed him.'

and

In the dreary six years which intervened between the fall of 'Germany' in the battle of Jena in 1806, and its recovery at the battle of Leipsig, Germany was gradually sinking into pauperism.

'Her higher orders were driven to despair by perpetual insult and robbery; her lower were compelled to criminal courses by the mere pressure of hunger. The system of smuggling had become the only resource of trade; and a more pernicious and demoralizing system never was offered to tempt the natural evil of man. Fraud, on a greater or lesser scale, was rapidly infecting all commercial transactions: every thing bore a fictitious name in the invoice; coffee passed the customs as horse-beans, sugar as starch, and pepper was alternately pease, rape-seed, and a hundred other things. The quantity of oaths, forgeries, and bribery that made this traffic pass down the consciences of the Douaniers, may be imagined. All was mystification, which yet mystified no one; hungry artifice openly arrayed against bloated plunder.'

But the crisis was ripening. The effects of this system on the burghers of Hamburg, and the people at large, are described by the Writer with the distinctness of a close and shrewd observer. For some time before the insurrection, the French garrison in that city felt themselves to be in the midst of a hostile population. But, in place of entering into the historic details, which will be best learned from the narrative, we shall transcribe the Writer's description of this ancient Gothic Hanse-town.

The first aspect of this famous old city gives the idea of opulence, as opulence displayed itself in the ancient days of Germany. It is not a French display, nor an Italian: it is the gloomy, solid, and almost severe visage of the old Teutonic. Hamburg strikes the eye as a

VOL. IX.-N.S.

H

place where much money was made and much expended, and yet where it was both made and expended by merchants and those merchants republicans. .. Some of the public buildings are historic; and if they are superabundant in neither grace nor majesty, yet they occasionally have the look of times, when the Hamburg merchant could wield the battleaxe as well as the pen, and buckle on his iron coat against Swede and Dane. The front of the senate house, heavy and huge, is a gallery of civic heroes, all bronzed and gilded in full costume, and enveloped in wig and regimentals, "as a general ought to be;" the long line of trading gallantry from Charlemagne, or Nimrod. If Commerce ever sat for the portrait of Bellona, those champions of the desk might circle her car, as the attendant genii.

But, to my sorrow, Hamburg is all pavé; the streets were, of course, universal mire after the day's rain; as in sunshine they are universal dust; and the wonders of the city were not to be seen, without hazarding something little short of suffocation in public mud. It is odd enough, that this universal offence in the continental cities should arise not more from laziness, than luxury. "Thank Heaven," said the French abbé, when he found himself on the flags of London, "a pedestrian's bones are worth something here;" and this was the whole In Paris, the pedestrian's bones were worth nothing; for every man who was worth any thing rode in his carriage. The Hamburgers had been under the same circumstances; the time was, when they were not compelled to know whether their streets were earth or water; for such was the opulence of the city at the close of the last century, that there was scarcely a shopkeeper's family without an equipage and a country-house. The ladies of the firm seldom came into Hamburg but to purchase some finery of the day; the gentlemen came in but to spend an hour behind the counter, hold open their hands for the golden shower that was literally pouring upon them from every corner of the earth, and then drive back to their villas, and luxuriate for the rest of the day among their lilies and roses. In fact, the life of the great English merchant now was the life of the little Hamburg trader then. The French reformed this thoroughly; the marshals first cut down the opulence by a series of contributions, levied with the sabre; Napoleon gave the second blow by his "decrees;" but the final and the fatal blow was given by letting loose the swarm of French employés upon the unfortunate city. The rough men of the sabre trampled down the field; but it was the préfets, the collectors, and the custom-house officers, that played the part of the locust, and nipped every leaf and sprout of commerce out of the soil.

The landscape round the city is Dutch,-flat, quiet, and green, sprinkled with houses, looking not unlike those which sprinkled the suburb fields of London a hundred and fifty years ago; low, yet sometimes spreading over a considerable extent, sometimes showy, but, in most instances, ample and convenient. Hamburg itself is an inland Amsterdam, a huge mass of buildings, imbedded in a marsh on the side of a lazy river, and cut through in all directions with sullen canals. The citizens pronounce it a Venice, and a Venice it is, if we divest the Adriatic queen of her palaces, her squares, her skies, and her recollections.' Vol I. pp. 61-63.

I have just returned, after a ramble among the villages. The mother city looks best from the outside. The villages are little, wild, odd things, with a primitive look, yet with some kind of gaiety. They put us in mind of a group of young Quakers, with the blood of youth contending against the inveteracy of the drab; or the unwilling formality of a family circle in the presence of the venerable and forbidding grandmother of the household. The brown roofs and ponderous steeples of the city are seen from every dell and thicket for miles round, looking gravity, and frowning down the light propensities of the rising generation of villas.

The contrast, to one returning from the country into the sudden gloom of the streets, renders all their evils still more unpalatable. Whatever better times, or another generation, may make of the city, it is now dark, intricate, and miry, to the full republican measure. Republicanism may have its advantages, but it never paves, sweeps, lights, or whitewashes; the sovereign people feels the value of its independence too profoundly to suffer any intrusion of authority in the shape of public comfort; cleanliness is a breach of privilege, and the order to hang up two lamps where but one twinkled before, would be an insult to the genius of the constitution altogether unheard of. The result is, that there is not a stone in the streets of Hamburg which has not been suffered to settle into its place by the laws of gravity; not a spout which does not irrigate the passer by, and seem to be employed for that sole purpose; not a crevice which does not widen into a pool; not a pool which does not widen into a gulph; and, in a huge city of ravines of lanes, and cut up with foggy canals, not a light much exceeding that of a moderate cigar. The senate know all this, and are alternately laughed at and libelled for not smoothing their pavements, stopping up their pools, and lighting their streets. what can any citizen-senate on earth do more than groan over the commonwealth; draw up magnanimous resolutions, and throw them into the fire, through fear of offending the freeborn sordidness and patriotic putrescence of the state; and leave the rest to destiny and the general conflagration.

But

I honour and esteem the spirit of Hamburg in its resistance to the French, but all my respect cannot disguise from all my senses, that the city would be infinitely the better for a good, active bombardment. But an earthquake would be the true benefactor. Any thing would be good that would bore, batter, scatter, and prostrate some furlongs of those streets, that, wild and winding as the shafts of a coal mine, seem nearly as dark, narrow, subterraneous, and unwholesome. After having so lately renewed my recollections of fresh air and open sky, I feel doubly incarcerated among those endless piles of old houses, like so many German barons, bowing round me with stiff decrepitude. The city has some memorable old buildings, but the republican spirit, which forgets every thing but its crabbed rights and peevish privileges, leaves them to the common career of men and buildings; and there they stand or fall, proud with established squalidness, and solemn with the sacred dirt of ages.' Vol. II. pp. 217-20.

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Still the city is a fine old gloomy relic, of fine old gloomy times;

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