ART. IX.-England in 1835. Being a Series of Letters written to Friends in Germany, during a Residence in London, and Excursions into the Provinces. By FREDRICK VON RAUMER, Professor of History at the University of Berlin. Translated from the German. By SARAH AUSTIN. 3 vols. 8vo. London:

1836.

I N these times of political excitement, when the opinions of every man on the most indifferent circumstances and events of the day seem to receive a colour from his party sentiments, there are two classes of foreign writers to whom England appears to furnish nothing but a field for prejudiced remark and bitter declamation. Her institutions offer them only the hoped for evidences of progressive decay; the recollection of her triumphs abroad embitters the feeling with which they regard her wealth and prosperity at home; her social usages, little understood even by her well wishers, are misrepresented among her enemies in the most grotesque caricatures. Above all, as few take the pains to judge from their own personal observation, of the actual condition of their neighbours, the exaggerations on one side or the other, in which our own party scribes are in the habit of indulging, are seized upon as undoubted authority; and pictures of present misery and approaching revolution are drawn with additional confidence from the statements of English writers themselves.

That partisans of the 'Movement' in France, or disciples of the exalted school of young Germany,' should look upon England with peculiar hostility is not to be wondered at. National inde

pendence, and the cause of liberal institutions have, it must be confessed, some ground of accusation against us. All the passions and interests which were repressed or crushed by the settlement of 1815 are, from old recollections, set in permanent hostility to the name of England, however different her vocation may be in 1836. But the chief source of the distaste of republicans for our country and institutions lies deeper. The very existence of British society, and British power, afford a daily refutation to sundry modern theories of the social system. It is, therefore, natural enough, that the partisans of those theories (and although they are but speculative doctrines amongst ourselves, blood flows, and prisons are filled for them on the continent,) should seek as far as possible to elude that refutation. Every existing sign of prosperity or stability receives therefore from them a contrary interpretation. In their eyes, every phenomenon is a presage of evil; and the vast activity, the stupendous wealth, and the ever-active intelligence of the densely-peopled world under their view, appear

to them enveloped in one dark cloud, pregnant with the elements of sudden and tempestuous ruin.

But the hatred which is borne us by the high legitimate party of the Continent is quite as cordial, and far less justifiable. To our profusion of treasure and blood-ill spent in some instances, spent without requital in all—that party owes its power and almost its existence. Had England not rallied, armed, and encouraged its defenders, the old hereditary régime would probably have been as completely swept away from the soil of Europe, west of the Vistula, as from that of France herself. It was the power of England which formed the keystone of the Holy Alliance, although not framed with her actual co-operation: without us that alliance must have fallen to pieces from its own ill-balanced weight. Yet it is precisely from those classes and parties, which the overthrow of Napoleon placed in power, that we now encounter the most hearty and constant vituperation. Let it not be imagined, that the hostile tone of the legitimatist body towards England has its origin only in the events of 1830. Long before that period, the exalted Catholic zealots of France, and the official scribes of German and Northern Cabinets, were quite as loud, and as regardless of truth in their accusations, quite as lavish of political prophecies, ever falsified by events, as they are at the present day.

'I do not believe,' says M. Von Raumer, himself a Prussian, and strongly attached to his own national institutions, that there are to be found any where so many prophets of death for England as in Berlin. The "Wochenblatt," the "Spikersche Correspondent," and especially the clever " Prussian,' a keen observer and an elegant writer, all agree that Great Britain is about to die,—not at some future time or other, but at once and in all haste, of ten different disorders :-Reform and revolution, taxes and debts, misery and ignorance, ruin of agriculture, over-speculation in manufactures, drunkenness, prostitution, &c. Mere painting, black on black, or grey on grey, an exaggerated imitation of Rembrandt in rhetoric!'

'Do not judge,' he says in another letter, of the condition of the world, exclusively after the views of certain diplomatists; they all acquire a strong predilection for some things, and an equally obstinate prejudice against others; and what they have said to themselves a hundred times, passes at last with them for actual gospel. Their rank, or their affectation of rank, holds them aloof from communication with persons of different classes and occupations; they seldom hear an opinion or a conviction sharply and distinctly expressed. Life, in its manifold variety, is full of points and corners; but the by-paths of a diplomatist are like the intricate courses of a parcel of smooth marbles rolling in different directions. The diplomatists of the continent find also especial difficulty in understanding a country so foreign to their nature as Great Britain; and, if they have made their preliminary exercises at Paris, and learnt to set a French pair of spectacles on Russian eyes, all seems to waver and float indistinctly

before them; and all definite forms and outlines disappear from their view. A few days ago a famous diplomatist said to me-the King of England, in order to secure the passage of the Irish Church bill through the House of Lords, will create from 50 to 100 Peers. I, who am neither famous nor a diplomatist, said, he will create none. Then, replied the other, the bill falls to the ground, and civil war will be organized by O'Connell. I answered, there will be no civil war; but the Catholics will persevere in the non-payment of tithes, and the Protestant church, for which the zealots fight, will have to bear the loss. The church then, answered the other, is ruined whether the bill passes or not; and if the church is ruined, England herself is inevitably destroyed. I replied, however events may waver backwards and forwards for some time to come, a secular plundering of church revenues, of which in the present bill there is no trace whatever, will not take place, and the so-called Voluntary system will not conquer. But, as religious oaths and sinecures are abolished in the State, so they will also come to an end; the former in the universities, the latter in the church. These changes lead to no ruin, but to the improvement of existing institutions. The life of the whole British Empire does not consist in one and the same external form of the church;-in Ireland the Catholic form, in England the Episcopal, in Scotland the Presbyterian prevails all are living institutions, and all will continue to live, and will become better from year to year, as the stones of offence and of intolerance, which are falsely represented as principles of Christianity, are more and more cleared out of the way, and each church is more and more taught to rely on love as the fundamental article of our faith.'

All the partisans of extreme doctrines, in short, whatever the complexion of their opinions may be, seem to look with fervent expectation for that day of which Napoleon so often prophesied the advent

'Bidding our town in one vast blaze expire,

Her towers in dust, her Thames a lake of fire'

without one thought for the heavy injury-the long and almost hopeless blight-which general liberty and civilisation would endure from such a catastrophe. The disciple of equality denounces a country in which political life, and social usages, every where bear witness to the preponderance of a powerful and wealthy oligarchy. The theoretical republican turns with sovereign contempt from a land in which custom as well as law still sanction the interference of an hereditary aristocracy with the course of government, when, in the rest of Western Europe, the ancient pride and power of the noblesse seem smitten with absolute paralysis;—when a Jew stockbroker has just succeeded a playwright in swaying the destinies of Castile and Aragon ;-and, in France, the son of a bad cook has crept over the necks of his colleagues into the seat of ministerial supremacy. Catholics contemplate our multitude of obscure and vulgar sects with pre-eminent disgust; whilst Ame

ricans are equally offended by the sight of a titled and endowed church. The admirer of the new-fashioned absolutism of the continent sees nothing but anarchy in a realm where the King is a cypher in his council, and the police little better than a cypher in the ordinary administration of the country. England offers at this moment (as she has offered for the last 150 years) an asylum to the Fuorusciti of every possible faction. She even now contains fragments which every successive political tempest has detached from the coast of France-Nobles and Priests of the first emigration, who prefer to drag out their existence here on the scanty pittance afforded by their government (formerly in the shape of an annual stipend, but since 1830 only as an occasional succour), rather than return to a country which has long become changed and cold to them and their feeling-Conventionalists, Bonapartists, Carlists; and a few specimens of the last and wildest of all the discomfited parties, the modern Republicans, freshly escaped from the prison of Sainte Pelagie. We have known individual specimens belonging to most of these classes, and however violently they might differ on other points, we have generally found them to agree in one. They all found consolation in their exile from the comfortable persuasion, that the land of their refuge was hastening every day towards irretrievable perdition.

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From such distorted views, it is most satisfactory to appeal to the calm and reasonable judgment of such a writer as M. Von Raumer, who must be well known to many of our readers as a historical scholar of the first eminence. We are not precisely acquainted with the circumstances of his political history, although we know that he is, in public estimation at least, considered as a supporter of existing institutions in the German confederacy, and especially in Prussia; and has thus been exposed to the peculiar vituperation of Henry Heine, the Coryphæus of young Germany.' Whether he is in any way connected with the Prussian Government we cannot tell all we know is, that if his admiration of the Prussian King and the Prussian system sometimes appears exaggerated to English eyes, his remarks are always conceived in a liberal and enlightened spirit. Although, in principle, an adherent of the middle party in European politics, and certainly exhibiting a turn of thought and sentiment which would render him liable, in France, to the unenviable title of Doctrinaire, he seems to hold the revolutionary extreme in much greater aversion than its opposite; and to be a Conservative in the fullest sense of the word-one who is desirous for the maintenance of the status quo of Europe, and for the preservation of old political institutions, as best adapted to the necessities of the several countries in which they flourish. The

observations of such a writer, where we have reason to place confidence in his good sense and honesty, possess a real value. It is unquestionably advantageous to be able to look, for a moment, at the existing circumstances and relations of things by which we are surrounded with other eyes than our own; but nothing is gained by the exchange, if we can only procure the distorted optics of some foreign partisan, who is still more liable to be misled by his political predilections, than we by our national prejudices. But when we encounter a traveller, who is a zealous and intelligent admirer of England and her institutions, to a degree which some even here may deem excessive, and which is certainly little calculated to secure him popularity abroad, we are happy in being able to learn of him what portions of these institutions he is most solicitous to preserve as they are, and what, in his view, requires amendment; and to ascertain his unbiassed sentiments as to our present policy and prospects. In this view, the volumes before us, filled as they are with political disquisitions, will prove interesting to many. They will find in them a diary of those important public occurrences which occupied so much of our own thoughts during the progress of the first half of last year; together with the reflections which they drew, day by day, from the pen of an enlightened and dispassionate foreigner. We do not say that there is much of originality in M. Von Raumer's observations; and we have not noted many striking passages, or much which will convey new impressions to the reader: the general result left upon our minds is rather that of sound practical sense of moderate and reasonable opinions-and of a thorough good-humoured inclination to see every thing, as far as possible, on the favourable side.

One observation has been very strongly brought home to us by the perusal of these Letters; they evince the incalculable facilities which the study of past times affords for the comprehension of the present. M. Von Raumer had never visited England until last year; nor had the course of his life and employments thrown him much in the way of acquiring a practical knowledge of English society or usages. But, as an historian by profession, he had studied that society and those usages in books, until they became far more familiar to him than they become to foreigners in general after a long residence amongst us. Hence, from the first moment of his landing in England, he neither expresses nor betrays any peculiar difficulty in comprehending those details of English life and peculiarities,no less of private than of political existence,-which make England appear, in the phrase of Shakespeare, rather in, than of the society of European States. Hence the reader will detect, in his Letters, no traces of that preliminary apprenticeship which most travellers have to