vegetation, it impresses the most careless spectator with a feeling of overpowering awe, akin to that which it was intended to produce in the mind of the worshipper of old. Close by is the theatre, one of the most perfect of any in Sicily, and in the distance Mount Eryx, where was the temple of Venus Erycina-the most sensual of all the heathen establishmentswhose priestesses were chosen for their beauty, and to whose support the revenues of several cities were appropriated. Segesta, or gesta, was one of the oldest colonies in the island, and is supposed to be of Asiatic origin. Æneas landed at its tower—

Whose hollow earth Anchises' bones contains,

And where a prince of Trojan lineage reigns!

Little remains more to be recorded of the fairy island save a word or two for Palermo, its modern capital. There the hotels are good, the streets handsome, although rather remarkable for shirt scenery and ranges of overhanging galleries. Like most southern towns, Palermo presents a strange and incongruous admixture of magnificence and meanness, of stench and splendour. Its numerous convents and monasteries constitute a very gloomy feature in its social as well as its architectural condition.

The sumptuous palaces of La Cuba and La Ziza preserve the monumental interest of Saracenic times; the Palazzo Reale, the Capella Reale, La Martorana, and many other edifices, still records the epoch of Norman rule. The celebrated cathedral of Palermo was founded by Walter Ofamilio, the Englishman, in the reign of William the Good. The architecture of Sicily is, however, like its language and the blood of its people, modified by the admixture of Greek, Arabic, Norman, and Spanish types. The pointed style which first appear in this magnificent building, undergoes further transitions in the Monasterio della Pieta, San Francisco di Assisi, and others. The Palazzo dei Tribunali, the Ospedale Grande and the Vecchio Dogana are the best specimens of domestic architecture. The Marina, at Palermo, is avowedly the most beautiful promenade in Europe. The botanical garden is a perfect garden of Armida. Monte Pellegrino is another Gibraltar-without the fortifications.

In the neighbourhood are the convents of Santa Maria di Gesu, of Norman foundation, buried in the most beautiful vegetation; the church and monastery of Santo Spirito, where is that oft-spoken-of collection of skeletons, among which may be seen soldiers in all their regimental finery, and females in white kid gloves, their skulls grinning horribly from the midst of ribbons and laces. Far more worthy of visit are the convent of San Martino, than which few palaces are more vast or inspiring, and the magnificent Norman cathedral of Monreale. The suburban villas, especially at Bagaria, are also gems of eccentricity and fantastic taste, expended on the most bountiful of all soils, and the most lovely of all climates. Who would not travel, at this gloomy season-which he can do with Mr. Bartlett's book in hand, without moving from his arm-chairin this island so redolent of beauties?

IT has been observed by an intelligent and graceful foreign writerwho has been styled the Addison of his own country's literature-that whereas in some lands the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation, and are the only fixed abodes of elegant and cultured society, while the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry, in England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering place, or general rendezvous of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gaiety and dissipation, and having indulged this kind of carnival, return again to the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. Hence Geoffrey Crayon's warning to the stranger who would correctly appreciate English character, not to confine his observations to London, but to examine our rural life. The traveller, he says, "must go forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens, along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches, attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and humours." As for him who travels not, and is dependent on books for his acquaintance with the village life and rural characteristics of England, few records can compete with those of Miss Mitford, in quaint adaptation to the spirit of the subject, in graphic sketches from nature at first hand, in cordial sympathy with the diversified topics under review, and in a quiet, home-bred humour, itself racy of the soil. Like Geoffrey Crayon himself, she may be chargeable with occasionally idealising and over-beautifying her favourite scenery and her pet protegés; but every hearty English soul must acknowledge her skill in the difficult art of description.

The "difficult" art of description? Is that a tenable phrase? Does not, on the contrary, every free Briton who writes letters-and a prodigious per centage of the population must own that soft impeachment, in these days when Rowland Hill and the schoolmaster are both abroad, and have met, and mutually embraced-does not every retailer of pothooks fancy himself, herself, or (duly to accommodate the scale to tender years) itself, a powerful hand at describing, be the object described what it may, from the Crystal Palace to the penny wax-works? Is it allowable to call that difficult which, by hypothesis, all can do; and which, by postulate, all can do well?

To describe external objects, one by one, says Christopher North, is no doubt easy; and accordingly it is often done very well. But-as he The genius of Washington Irving-the Goldsmith, nay, even the Addison of America."-Lord Mahon's "History of England," vol. v., p. 101. t "The Sketch Book." Miss Mitford has modelled her style, perhaps too closely, on that of this agreeable Miscellany, and its still more entertaining companion, "Bracebridge Hall."

goes on to show-to produce a picture in words, there must be a principle of selection, and that principle cannot be comprehended without much reflection on the mode in which external objects operate upon the mind. "Sometimes a happy genius, and sometimes a strong passion, vivifies a whole scene in a single line. But the observer of nature, who has neither genius, nor passion, nor metaphysics, can do little or nothing but enumerate. That he may do with great accuracy, for he may be a noticing and strong-sighted person. Not a feature of a landscape shall escape him-each sentence of his description shall constitute a natural and true image, and ordinary people like himself will think it admirable. Yet shall it be altogether worthless; while one stanza of Burns' wafts you into the very heart of Paradise." And thus it is that such a man as Wordsworth will make more of

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye,

than men of low degree will make of a cedar of Lebanon, or a Royal Oak:-" he will make a better poem on a gooseberry bush, than you will do on the great Persian sycamore, which is about seventy feet in girth." There is a "knack" in first-rate descriptions; and this knack is innate, or connate, or what you will-except acquired. Improved and refined by practice it unquestionably is; but the artificial manufacture of it is Brummagem ware--and the difference between them is that between delf and porcelain, plated and plate.

Now, Miss Mitford has a natural gift for description. It is not, perhaps, of a very lofty order, or large compass; and though tinged with the couleur de rose of fancy which idealises, it has little of the imaginative, creative

Light that never was on sea or shore.

But in her own sphere, she is a fine describer. Let but her foot be on her native heath, and her name is-Miss Mitford. Her testimony is not given on hearsay, or on the strength of a well-stocked library; she testifies to what she has seen, and heard, and felt, on the breezy downs of the Day-side of Nature. To her we may apply what an eminent French critic says of the greatest of living French novelists:-"On n'a pas affaire ici à un peintre amateur qui a traversé les champs pour y prendre des points de vue: le peintre y a vécu, y a habité des années; il en connaît toute chose et en sait l'âme."* Some three-and-twenty years since, the Shepherd of the Noctes was made to say, "I'm just vera fond o' that lassie-Mitford. She has an ee like a hawk's, that misses naething, however far off-and yet like a dove's, that sees only what is nearest and dearest, and round about the hame-circle o' its central nest. I'm just excessive fond o' Miss Mitford." Cowper does not more effectually transport us, without material locomotion, from the fireside by

"Causeries du Lundi," tom. i., p. 282.

The gallant shepherd goes on, in his fervour, to protest that "the young gentlemen o' England should be ashamed o' theirsells for letting her name be Mitford. They should marry her whether she wull or no-for she would mak baith a useful and agreeable wife. That," concludes honest James; -"that's the best creetishism on her warks."-Noctes, No. xli. (1829); see also Noctes, Nos. xxix. and xxxix.

which we are reading him, to the scenes of our home counties: so that there is truth as well as prettiness in Mr. W. C. Bennett's Sonnet to the Lady about whom we write :

Out have I been this morning-out-away,

Far from the bustling carefulness of towns,
Through April gleams and showers-on windy downs,
By rushy meadow-streams with willows grey;
In thick-leafed woods have hid me from the day
Sultry with June-and where the windmill crowns
The hill's green height, the landscape that renowns
Thy own green county, have I, as I lay

Crushing the sweetness of the flowering thyme,
Tracked through the misty distance. Village greens
All shout and cheerfulness in cricket time,
Red winter firesides-autumn cornfield scenes,

All have I seen, ere I my chair forsook,
Thank to the magic of thy breezy book.

A deceased critic, who had the reputation of being crabbed and scolding in every review he penned, except when Miss Mitford was his theme, once met the stigma, or compliment, whichever he might think it, by saying, "And in her case how could I be otherwise than kind? she speaks to the heart and to the understanding, and deals in national beings and landscapes, such as a plain man may hope to see without going to another world. She is the only painter of true English nature that I know of: the rest are splendid daubers-all light and shade, darkness and sunshine; Mary Mitford gives the land and the people, and for that I honour her." It was something to win a sweeping panegyric like this from such a Miss Mitford, indeed, enjoys the privilege of favouritism in all quarters broad England loves her as one of its true aborigines-loves her hearty interest in its mannerisms, her appreciation of its excellences, her cheery, blythe, hopeful spirit, in which, ever beaming with sisterly good-will, her every fellow-countryman recognises tokens of personal sympathy

censor.

Φαιδρα γουν ἀπ ̓ ὀμμάτων

Σαινει με προστείχουσα.

This cheerful temperament imparts a special charm to the autumn of her days; for though it is right that the man at manhood should put away childish things, it is not right that he should include in his renunciation the chilk-like spirit, the faith and buoyancy and promise of life's spring. Happy that soil of the heart which yields this after-math! blessed that existence whose dimpled six years and furrowed sixty are bound each to each by natural piety! If Sparta so honoured Age, in its universal, and therefore its commonly forbidding aspects-how should we delight to honour those white hairs which have a crown of glory all their own, brightened not dulled, brightening not fading, with years that bring the philosophic mind.

Of Miss Mitford's early literary ventures in "high art," we have not

Poems by W. C. Bennett, p. 97-a collection of pleasant verses, "affectionately inscribed to" Mary Russell Mitford herself, by a seemingly congenial spirit.

† Edip. Coloneus.

much to say.
"Christina, the Maid of the South Seas," was introduced
to the public in six cantos; and we sadly fear the public found them
half-a-dozen cantos too many. Those were the days when the imitative
epidemic had Walter Scott's poetry for its fons et origo, when the press
teemed with metrical romances quite equal in quantity, and gloriously un-
equal in quality, to the stories of William of Deloraine and Ellen of
Douglas-with noble "Margarets of Anjou," and "Legends of Iona,"
and "Fights of Falkirk." Miss Mitford's verse is pronounced by Moir
deficient in that nameless adaptation of expression to thought, which is
accomplished by some "indescribable collocation of the best words in
their best places." Yet, in one at least of her tragedies, she has been
thought to rival Joanna Baillie herself. Tragedy perhaps ill squares
with the popular notion of "Our Village" gossip; yet has she written
and succeeded under the tutelage of Melpomene. At the "Feast of the
Violets," Apollo exclaims:

And Mitford, all hail! with a head that for green
From your glad village crowners can hardly be seen :
whereupon the Apollonic secretary, Leigh Hunt, observes,
And with that he shone on it, and set us all blinking;

but is careful to add,

And yet at her kind heart sat tragedy, thinking.

"Rienzi" and "Julian" were both attractive plays for a season, and, in reference to them, Allan Cunningham said that the author had witnessed that slope of wet faces, from the pit to the roof, which, according to Cowper, is the accompaniment of a well-written and well-acted tragedy. Her "Charles the First," produced under indifferent auspices, made less stir.

But it is to "manners-painting Mitford "—at home amidst her Hampshire and Berkshire haunts-that one turns with a more ready and abiding interest. A pleasant depôt of rural characteristics is "Our Village -with its close-packed inhabitants, insulated, as the author says, like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship-everybody interested in everybody: a spot over which we are invited to ramble, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, the birds, and mice, and squirrels-with the retired publican's tidy, square, red cottage; and the blacksmith's gloomy dwelling; and the village shop, multifarious as a bazaar, a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, bacon, and everything except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment; and the village inn, white-washed and bow-windowed, with its portly landlord in his eternal red waistcoat; and the cottages up the hill, where the road winds, with its broad green borders and hedge-rows so thickly timbered; and the old farm-house on the common, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills-the common itself half covered with low furze, and alive with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers. A delightful companion is the author along the high-ways and by-ways of her village;-there is something contagious in her keen delight at pioneering you about, and you get to walk with step well-nigh springy as her own upon the mazy