1859.]

quence of this style of thing is, that an artist of good promise is ruined. It is not nature that is put before us, but certain tricks of effect, which, however they may catch the eye at first, soon become wearisome and painful. Of course Mr. Foster can only repeat himself. The same weeds, the same trees, the same brook, the same sunsets and moonlights, are served up time after time. Nor is this all; the very same figures which appear in one volume do duty without alteration in another. Thus, a girl stooping with her pitcher at a brook, at page 14 of The Hamlet, appears in precisely the same attitude at page 239 of Wordsworth's Poems as the illustration to The Highland Girl. Mr. Foster may be able to reconcile such doings to his conscience. We can only trust that the ill-advised purchasers of his books may find him out, and make the practice of these artifices as unprofitable as it is unworthy.

Wordsworth has this year been the special victim of this tribe of picture-mongers. Wordsworth, the most sincere of writers, the poet who of all others in our time has drawn the most closely after nature, has been given up to be defaced by men who have obviously so long ceased to look at nature, that, were they now to do so, she would be sure to put them out.' Messieurs Gilbert and Foster, with the casual aid of Mr. Wolff, a portrayer of birds and beasts of the strangest fur and feather, have intruded their fancies into a volume of Wordsworth's best poetry, under the auspices of Messrs. Routledge; while Mr. Foster, upon the employment of Messrs. Longman, has done his best to make the White Doe of Rylstone unreadable. It is enough to say of these, that in the former case there are seventy-one plates, in the latter thirty, by Mr. Foster alone. Those to whom Wordsworth is familiar must resent these showy prettinesses as impertinent intrusions. They at least will never wrong the poet, or any youth or maiden whom they wish to understand him, by giving either of the volumes as a Christmas gift.

Another of the most objectionable of this class of books, is a well-se

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lected volume put forth by Messrs. Sampson Low and Co., of Favourite English Poems of the Two Last Centuries. We say most objectionable, because just in the ratio in which the poems are good, the illustrations are bad. One unpleasant feature of this volume is, that it reproduces illustrations, by Mr. Wehnert, of The Ancient Mariner and The Eve of St. Agnes, which have been published separately before, and very naturally failed, being too bad even for an illustrated book. In this volume, as in all of its class, the higher the order of poetry, the greater the demand it makes upon the imagination, the more certain is the want of that faculty in the draughtsman. Our English artists, even at the best, are not a peculiarly imaginative race. They excel in landscape and in character pieces, but the list of good works in the higher regions of fancy or imagination is an exceedingly brief one. Even in the hands of our best artists, such compositions could scarcely have justice done to them. But poor indeed must the relish for poetry be of that reader who does not make pictures for himself far beyond anything he will find in this volume, or in any of its fellows of the season. He had much better devote his leisure to Conic Sections, or the Differential Calculus, for clearly it is not for him that Milton, Coleridge, or Keats has written.

After the notorious failure of the Illustrated Tennyson produced by Mr. Moxon last year, which all the talents' of the pre-Raphaelite school combined to disfigure with an ingenuity beyond belief, one might have hoped to be spared further experiments of a similar nature upon our great poets. But such appears to be the prevailing fatuity among publishers, that we may expect to see every one of our favourites subjected in course of time to a similar treatment. Nay, we should not be at all surprised at the announcement next year of an illustrated In Memoriam. No enterprise is too daring for the tribe of illustrating Free Lances. They are resolved to leave nothing to

The still delight
And luxury of contemplation

They will not allow our fancy to have free play; they forbid us to give our imagination wings. The golden exhalations of the dawn' are to be made palpable and familiar to us on paper. The light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet's dream,' are to be enjoyed by us no more. Thoughts and things which only words can paint are to be pencilled upon blocks. Imaginative sympathy is to be superseded. We are no longer to work our thoughts,'* but must be content with what Messrs. Gilbert, Foster, and Co. 'show our eyes and grieve our hearts' withal. Doubtless we shall in due season have the world's great altar-stairs, which slope through darkness up to God,' done in wood by eminent hands,' and, in illustration of the poet's helpless efforts to read the purposes of God in the goings-on of this world, be shown in a bassinet of the nineteenth century

6

The infant crying in the night,
The infant crying for the light.

In a word, if this style of workmanship is tolerated, there will be no poem, however noble, no fancy, however tender, on which the hackney sketcher will not have impressed the soil of his unholy hands.

Why are the poets, above all others, to be handled in this way? Why are we not to be left to the unabated influence of their spirits speaking through their inspired language? Why is it to be made no longer possible to take up a book from the drawing-room table, except at the risk of seeing that text which has long been music to our ear, and celestial food to our heart, vulgarized by an intensely prosaic misrepresentation of some stray image of the poet's fancy? So long as they kept to the Tuppers and Robert Montgomerys, it was of no consequence what these illustrators did. There they were working with kindred spirits, as unreal, as vapid as themselves. But when they attack Goldsmith, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Wordsworth not to

speak of the Scriptural poems-it is time to call for the intervention of the literary police. It is impossible to regard these books otherwise than as an offence to all sound and reverential feeling. Why should the degradation of a great poet's text by a host of flashy woodcuts be deemed less an outrage of propriety than the wilful defacement of his tomb? It is no light matter to sow broadcast, under the seductions of satin paper, exquisite printing, and binding of irreproachable finish, texts of our noblest poets vitiated in this way. Who can estimate the injury to the minds of readers, especially young readers, from being clogged by the commonplace and vulgar unreality of the mass of these woodcut illustrations? Unhappily they are so interwoven with the text that the impressions from both are taken in together. Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson, therefore, are not left to work, as work they would, through the youthful imagination. On the contrary, the imagination is paralysed, and the impression from the poem inextricably mingled with remembrances of the base conceptions of the draughtsman. Better a thousandfold the humblest paper and printing, with the poem pure and unalloyed, than all this gaudy frippery of woodcut and gilding! The eye is unhappily too much fed nobler faculties. nowadays, to the prejudice of our Museums and

Crystal Palaces pamper us with sights which used to be achieved with effort, and seen at long intervals. We have so much to see, that we have no leisure to muse on what we see. Our very drama is degraded to a series of tableaux and spectacular shows. Let us leave one region free for our imaginations to work in! Let us not suffer the Grub

street of art to come between us and those

Who give us nobler thoughts and nobler

cares,

Henry V. Chorus, Act 3.

the above

the Thames, the one that calls up the pleasantest recollections to the mind of the veteran tourist is the old Batavier. In days gone by, when railways as yet were not, when Ostend, content with the rabbit and oyster trade, did not aspire to import the British traveller, and when Calais was on the road to nowhere except Paris, a mighty host of English emigrants used weekly to take passage per time-honoured boat. In those days the Rotterdam route was the recognised, indeed the only comfortable way of reaching the Rhine, Germany, or Switzerland; and there are still to be found those who are ready to declare to an incredulous generation that they found the journey an enjoyable one. It had its drawbacks, to be sure. A long sea passage, with its concomitant throes, is not in the abstract an agreeable inauguration of a pleasure trip; and from two to three days steaming up sleepy rivers, with nothing to look at except dykes and windmills, and lethargic little towns squatting among the eternal willows, may be somewhat monotonous. But on the other hand, there were, so the patriarchs of continental travel assert, certain pleasures peculiar to the voyage. In the first place the passengers being for some time thrown upon one another for mutual entertainment, there was as much liberty, equality, and fraternity among them as is compatible with the English constitution. Cases have been known in which a cosy glass of schnaps was discussed off Dort by parties who had been total strangers at St. Katherine's Wharf; and acquaintanceships commenced by moonlight on deck over a bottle of Rhine wine, did not necessarily terminate with the scramble for the luggage on landing. It is true there was this advantage, you had not then, as now, the chance of meeting your tailor in the disguise of a tourist not that your tailor has not as good a right to his holiday as you

the meeting may, under the circumstances, be embarrassing. Furthermore, there was, we are given to understand, a luxurious laziness about the whole affair which the railway traveller can neither know nor appreciate; a noble indifference about being up to time anywhere or catching anything. Your took your passage in the true Moslem spirit, and if the steamer stuck upon a mudbank, you said it was the will of Allah, and resignedly watched the rafts floating by, and the cattle enjoying their afternoon cud, and the crows in search of common objects on the shore, printing off arrow-headed records of their proceedings in the soft ooze. Necessity, and the influence of the surrounding landscape, induced a fine equable frame of mind; trifles became interesting, and annoyances actual sources of amusement. The very boarding of the boat by the douaniers had a sort of romance about it. There was something in smuggling then. But now, what with free trades and international regulations and amended tariffs, it has lost all its excitement. Do your best, and you can't cheat the revenue satisfactorily, while the chances are that, besides the consciousness of immorality, you will suffer the additional pang of observing that your contraband wares might have been bought five per cent. cheaper in the next market. Finally, it is not improbable that sober steam up to Cologne may have acted as a mild preparative a gentle tonic, so to speak-for more stirring scenessomewhat after the manner of an overture or a dinner pill.

While these good old times lasted, that powerful vessel the Batavier did a large and fashionable business. From June to September she discharged weekly on the Boompjes at Rotterdam, a select and elegant cargo, with the gigot sleeves, huge bonnets, high waists and collars, brimless sugar-loaf hats and slim trousers which the antiquary finds

delineated in the magazines of the period, and which still survive in the drawings of Mr. George Cruikshank. There were bridal parties with new unstained portmanteaus, going to bill and coo among the fir woods of the Taunus, and leggy young lordlings about to make the grand tour, and study everything under the Rev. Magnall Maunders, who always entered himself in the livre des voyageurs as ecclésiastique Anglais,' and was thought by the natives to be the cardinal next in succession for the archiepiscopal chair at Lambeth. There were chronic rheumatisms going to try the newly-discovered baths at Quacksalberbad, wicked old livers in quest of mineral waters to restore that activity which a regular attendance at Crockford's had impaired, interesting nerves requiring change of air and scene. There were plenty of pleasure-seekers, and healthseekers, and very few economy. seekers, for it had not as yet become a superstition that Baden is a cheap place, and that to go up the Rhine is equivalent to retrenchment, and so the old Batavier enjoyed good society, and was an eminently fashionable boat. But times are altered; 'trade's unfeeling train usurps the land,' and tries to rob the main. The railway, the short sea passage, and the fascinating idea of taking tea in London and an early dinner in Cologne the next afternoon, have given to this once liveliest vessel of the watery plain the touching aspect of a Deserted Vessel, at least as far as society is concerned. Her berths, those 'bowers of innocence and ease,' are occupied by men who deal in cheese, and Dutch butter merchants smoke their cheroots under her awning, that shade for invalids and whispering lovers made. Still, fallen as she is from her high estate, the Batavier sidles out into the river every Sunday morning as bravely as she did thirty years ago. Thirty years ago! What do we say? Why the oldest inha bitants of Limehouse and Rotherhithe believe the Batavier to be almost coeval with the Thames. Mr. Timbs, Mr. Peter Cunningham, and other competent autho rities, may be able to prove that

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the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney sailed for the Low Countries on board one of Elizabeth's ships of the line; that it was out of a Dutch skouw William III. stepped ashore, as described by Lord Macaulay, his valet following with the wig-box containing the ample peruke, which is inseparably associated with his glorious, pious, and immortal memory; that it was on board a totally different vessel that Lien Chi Altangi was so unwell on his passage from Rotterdam to London, as his second letter, edited by Dr. Goldsmith, says he was; the Netherlands Steamboat Company may advertise their Powerful New Steamship' in the most dogmatic capitals, but the amphibious population of east London will continue to hold the opinion that the Batavier has been for ages the only means of communication between this country and Holland, and even incline to a superstition that she is the original Flying Dutchman. If so, by right she ought to be at the Cape; but then the sentence may have been commuted to penal servitude on the London and Rotterdam line, and Vanderdecken allowed to assume the arms of Captain W. Smith.

Unless the above facts present an obstacle, the claims of the Batavier and Holland should not be overlooked when you are thinking about a quo exeas regno in the summer, or indeed, at any time of the year; for it is among the advantages which Holland offers, that sunshine and verdure are not indispensable to the traveller's enjoyment there. Even the veriest vagabond is supposed by courtesy to devote his Christmas to the cultivation of the domestic relations, but these may be casually interrupted. His Grace, with whom you usually pass that festive season, may be unable to receive you, owing to the painters being in the house, or the cook having gone on a visit to her friends. Under such circumstances, it might be at least worth consideration whether the features of a Dutch winter landscape did not hold out as great a prospect of amusement as the more sensuous scenery of the pantomime. But at any rate, in summer a week or ten days may be profitably laid out in