best market for the sale of their only products, and the purchase of all their requirements. It seems doubtful if agricultural improvement can be carried on in a way to give winter employment to any considerable proportion of the inhabitants of those countries in which, from November to April, snow and severe frost make access to the soil precarious, and not only prevent labour in the fields for many weeks or months together, but oblige the farmer to keep a great many labourers whom he cannot employ in winter, merely to have them in readiness for the short spring season, in which a great deal of out-door work must be done at once, that in our climate is going on during all the winter months. Economy of labour, which is one main object in all agricultural improvement with us, would be of doubtful advantage here. Denmark, farmed as her land now is, raises a large surplus of grain, dairy products, and cattle, besides subsisting her present population in a higher material and intellectual condition than any country in Europe. She might increase, by agricultural improvements, the amount of her products for exportation, but, in doing so, would necessarily increase, by the temporary demand for their labour, the agricultural population employed in executing those improvements. There is no other branch of industry in which this surplus of agricultural labour could be absorbed. This class is now in a happy equilibrium to the work to be done. It would not be prudent to disturb it, and to rear in Denmark what is now unknown, — a proletarian class of agricultural paupers, brought into existence when labour in agricultural improvements was in demand, and well paid, and, although able-bodied and willing to work, not able to find work when the agricultural improvements are accomplished, and the economy of labour, which is one great end of the improvement, sets in. In the improving and improved counties of Scotland, notwithstanding the great mass of employment in her manufacturing towns and districts, the action and reaction of a great demand for labour while improvements are going on, and a great cessation of demand for agricultural labour when they are finished, have produced great and lasting evil to the labouring class. The principles of what we call the science of political economy are, in short, applicable to no country but England. He would be a bold and blind statesman who would apply them to Denmark. CHAP. XVIII. - RE COPENHAGEN AND EDINBURGH COMPARED.—THORWALDSEN. ON an impartial comparison of the capitals of Scotland and Denmark, Edinburgh would have to resign to Copenhagen the title which, with a modesty characteristic of her merit, she assumes, of the modern Athens. Copenhagen, as observed in a previous Note, is the centre of a much greater literary activity. The Danish people consume more food for the mind than the Scotch, have more daily and weekly newspapers, and other periodical works, in their metropolis and in their country towns; and publish more translated and original works, have more public libraries, larger libraries, and libraries more easily accessible to persons of all classes, not only in Copenhagen, but in all provincial and country towns; have more small circulating libraries, book-clubs, musical associations, theatres, and theatrical associations, and original dramatic compositions; more museums, galleries, collections of statues, paintings, antiquities, and objects gratifying to the tastes of a refined and intellectual people, and open equally to all classes, than the people of Scotland can produce in the length and breadth of the land. The modern Athens! The traveller who comes out of the Museum of Thorwaldsen, a building specially erected for his productions, containing all the busts, models, sketches, ideas, in clay, plaster, or on paper, of that great artist, and sees the admiration of the common man at groups or single figures, modelled from the antique or from the artist's fancy, and to which the free access of the public has, by repeated visits, raised his taste, and has taught him to admire what is good in art, will smile when he remembers the Tam O'Shanters, and Highland Pipers, and Wallaces in sandstone, or the Sir Walters, and Queen Victorias, in marble, received and admired in the modern Athens as masterpieces of fine art. In veneration for their great artist, the Danish people have shown a high feeling for art. His whole life, after he retired from Rome, was an ovation. On his death, every article belonging to him, even to the furniture of his chamber, his books, drawings, every thing, however trifling,-was preserved, and deposited in the order in which he used them, in rooms assigned to them in the Thorwaldsen Museum. It contains nothing but Thorwaldsen. You see the life's work of his mind and hand, from the earliest essay to the last unfinished idea in clay; and you wonder that the life of one man could have produced so much. The very amount of manual labour in plaster and clay, and finally in the marble, is astonishing. This manual labour of the artist in forming himself, and even in producing the model he is to work from, is overlooked and forgotten, when we see the finished statue. All Thorwaldsen is here. His tomb is in the court of the building; his works fill the galleries, and his household furniture, books, and relics, have apartments like those he lived in, and are not the least or last visited by the Copenhageners. All these trea sures of fine art, statues, statuettes, heads, arms, bodies, from the first conception to the finished model from which the perfect statue has been chiselled in marble, and all in fragile material, clay or plaster, are open to the public. Small articles, such as coins, medals, seals, are under glass cases, but are taken out, if desired, for closer inspection. How long would such a collection remain unmutilated and undamaged in Edinburgh, if the public, and persons even far above the lowest class, had equally free access to it? The finest statues and models would be tattoed with the initials of all the clerks and apprentices in Edinburgh, or wantonly deprived of toes, features, or limbs. The Scotch Athenians have still the itch in their finger ends, and cannot refrain from touching, rubbing, and handling. The want of that respect for intellectual objects, which is the test of the civilisation of a people, is not confined to the lowest classes in Edinburgh. Soon after the solar eclipse, the conversation where I was, turned upon the advantage it would be of to the youth of all classes in Copenhagen, if there was a popular observatory, furnished with instruments sufficiently good to give a view of the satellites of Jupiter, the ring of Saturn, the aspect of the moon, and such astronomical objects; and it was referred to me, whether there was not such an establishment on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh. I was almost ashamed to say that there had been, — that there had been a good solar microscope, models of various interesting machines, such as the atmospheric locomotive engine, and the electric telegraph, showing their working, and a telescope of no ordinary power, the same, I believe, with which the maker, Short, discovered, much more than half a century ago, that |