the individual one of the body, thus giving him the benefit of the love, sympathies, intercession around, and bringing all the good influences moving in the Christian society to bear upon him. Our image of Christianity wants altering: we have a wrong image in our minds. The individual's spiritual Christian growth is not a solitary internal process only as we image it-one between himself and God only: it is a social process. Even that very internal process of spiritual self-improvement, which, as distinguished from the more public sphere of religion, we make so absolutely and decidedly an individual process, is not an individual one but a social one. Carry your Christianity into the most inmost recesses, its most central workings, to its very seat and fountain-head within the soul,-to that point where the will collects itself, where the strain is made, and where it is most one's own real self acting,-even here it is not individual, but social. There are proper degrees, shapes, modifications of sociality, but still Christianity is essentially social. Not an arithmetical crowd of stiff erect individualities, not a host of straight strokes that do not touch each other, but one great mingling of hearts, one overflowing unity, wave embracing wave; an ocean of the spiritual life, filling every corner, and allowing no separations and isolations within its bosom, is the living Church. The individual is not a spiritual world within himself: he belongs to the spiritual world universal. He is a connected relative being: he depends for his growth on this connexion and these relations being used and developed. In the career of one human soul are involved the influences, seen and unseen, of the whole spiritual world it is in. • Whether one 'member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.' There is no ❝ schism in the body;' and its members have ' care one for another.' This whole idea wants being impressed upon us. The idea of communion, participation, fellowship is not embraced, and should be. Religion wants unbending and expanding: souls should be brought together; Christians should understand each other; hearts should respond to each other; there should be places for openness and confidence within the bosom of the Church. ART. III.-1. Diary of Tracels in France and Spain, chiefly in the Year 1844. By the Rev. FRANCIS TRENCH. 2 vols. London: Bentley. 1845. 2. Rome and the Reformation; or, a Tour in the South of France. A Letter to the Rev. R. Burgess. By I. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNÉ. London: Seeleys. 1844. 3. Letters from the Pyrenees. By T. CLIFTON PARIS, B. A. Trinity College, Cambridge. 2 vols. London: Murray. 1843. 4. Vacation Rambles and Thoughts. By T. N. TALFOURD, D. C. L. 2 vols. London: E. Moxon. 1845. 1842. 5. A Pilgrimage to Auvergne, from Picardy to Le Velay. By LOUISA S. COSTELLO. 2 vols. London: Bentley. THE steady and unfailing issue of voyages and travels, though as familiar and long-established an affair as that of cottons, or any other article of general consumption, is yet not a little curious, if we reflect on it. That the stream of poetry, metaphysics, or novels, should flow on, ever fresh and fresh, is natural; for invention and imagination are inexhaustible sources; but, when the business is simply description of a country and people, an account of manners and scenes, even that wonderful richness and variety which the face of nature, and the condition of humanity, present, must at last be exhausted, and transferred to paper, by the innumerable hands and pens employed in the task. For a tourist to find untrodden ground is quite impossible. To say nothing of Europe, every corner of which is as well known to us, or better, than the county of Kent; is there a square yard of ground in all the five continents which the restless curiosity of English travellers has not raked up? a building, a rock, or a tree, which they have not catalogued? In the most obscure and latent island in the South Sea, would one not, reversing the case of Robinson Crusoe, be alarmed if one did not see the print of a foot? There has, indeed, almost ceased to be any such thing as a foreign country; we are at home everywhere, and all the world is a home to us. Sporting M.P.s have their Chateau in Provence, or their Schloss in Hungary, instead of a shooting-box on the moors; and Oxford and Cambridge students go for fly-fishing, in the long vacation, to Norway, instead of to Wales. But, the truth is, that novelty of scene is now no longer the chief recommendation in a book of travels. It is true that much interest must always attach to such revelations of hidden things as Stephens' of the cities of central America; and those who seek for the more stimulating class of excitement will be attracted by the exploits of Captain Forbes, who bags his twenty brace of tigers per diem in the jungles of Ceylon; or of Major Harris, who thinks nothing of his three rhinoceroses before breakfast, in the Highlands of Ethiopia. These desperate efforts to find, in the age of railways, the field of the wild and marvellous adventure of a by-gone time, are, like Don Quixote's quest of chivalry, a day too late. A much truer and wider interest is obtained by a very different class of travels. In these, the more at our own doors the scene, the more ordinary the incident, and, in keeping with this, a style plain and homely, the better; the more beaten the track chosen by the traveller, the more likely he is to find readers; and Talking of the Alps and Apennines, is more attractive than a six months' campaign in Ashantee, or a survey of Tehuantepec. Among many other causes which might be assigned for this, the following is, perhaps, the principal:-In former times the great readers of travels were those who never travelled. Not to go back to the days of Bruce and Dr. Clarke, when Englishmen, except of the highest ranks, hardly ever quitted their own country, the continental war retarded the natural progress of the habit of promiscuous travelling. Thus, at the peace, when the adventurous spirits had nothing to do, or to detain them from roaming through the earth at will, there was a rich harvest of new countries, and new nations, and tribes, civilized and savage, to visit and describe, and novelty was thus the chief recommendation of a book of travels. The bulk of readers were then the tarry-at-home travellers, who read of places they had never seen, nor formed the desire to see, with the greater interest on that very account; but now a new generation of readers has arisen-of those who have travelled, or hope to travel, and whose interest in a volume of travels arises from its going over the ground themselves have lately visited, or are looking to with pleasant anticipation. We derive the same sort of pleasure from reading a tour under these circumstances that we do from comparing notes, in the public room of the inn, with the traveller whom chance throws in our way in the evening. As in this viva voce communication, intelligence and observation are desirable, yet not so indispensable but that one can learn something from the most ordinary and common-place persons, so it is with the written tour, the most meagre diary, even a bare record of dates and distances, will be gone through with interest during that process of conning of maps and guide-books which precedes a tour. To this class belong Nos. I and 3 of the books whose very titles stand at the head of this Article, and to which we shall return presently. We wish, first, to say a few words on one source of interest peculiar to travellers in any country with whose history we may happen to be familiar. On the pleasure and benefit to be derived from a tour in such a country, in respect of historical knowledge, we dwelt at some length in a former number. Besides this study of historical sites, there is another pregnant point of view in which the instructed traveller may regard the country he visits-in its physical geography. Let us consider a little what a knowledge of geography is. First, I grant, it is a knowledge of the relative position and distance of places from one another; and by places, I mean either towns or the habitations of particular tribes or nations; for I think our first notion of a map is that of a plan of the dwellings of the human race; we connect it strictly with man and with man's history. And here I believe many persons' geography stops; they have an idea of the shape, relative position, and distance of different countries; and of the position, that is, as respects the points of the compass, and mutual distance of the principal towns. Every one, for example, has a notion of the shapes of France and of Italy, that one is situated north-west of the other, and that their frontiers join; and again, every one knows that Paris is situated in the north of France, Bordeaux in the south-west, &c. Thus much of knowledge is indeed indispensable to the simplest understanding of history. Yet, you will observe that this knowledge does not touch the earth itself, but only the dwellings of men upon the earth. It regards the shapes of a certain number of great national estates, so to call them ; the limits of which, like those of individuals' property, have often respect to no natural boundaries, but are purely arbitrary. A real knowledge of geography embraces at once a knowledge of the earth, and of the dwellings of man upon it; it stretches out one hand to history, and the other to geology and physiology; it is just that part in the dominion of knowledge where the students of physical and of moral science meet together. 'And without denying the usefulness of that plan-like knowledge of geography of which I have spoken, it cannot be doubted that a far deeper knowledge of it is required by him who would study history effectively. And the deeper knowledge becomes far the easier to remember. For my own part, I find it extremely difficult to remember the position of towns, when I have no other association with them than their situation relatively to each other. But let me once understand the real geography of a country, its organic structure if I may so call it, the form of its skeleton, that is, of its hills; the magnitude and course of its veins and arteries, that is, of its streams and rivers; let me conceive of it as of a whole made up of connected parts; and then the position of man's dwellings, viewed in reference to these parts, becomes at once easily remembered, and lively and intelligible besides.'-Arnold's Lectures, p. 158. If, then, a knowledge of this kind of geography be requisite for a full understanding of history, it is a knowledge which can be rightly acquired only by personal travel. A good description, aided by a good map, may, however, do something towards conveying such a conception of a country; and this, it is evident, is all we can have in respect of far the greater part of the countries whose history we read of; and the profit each person will derive from such a description will be in the degree in which he has formed the habit of looking at the face of a country with a topographical eye. As an instance, in illustration of the kind of geographical view above characterized, we will cite part of a masterly description of France, by M. Michelet. 'Let us take a look at France as a whole, that we may see into what divisions it naturally breaks itself. 'Mount one of the most elevated peaks of the Vosges, or, if you prefer it, of Jura, and let us turn our back upon the Alps. We may discern, supposing our vision able to command an horizon of three hundred leagues, an undulating line reaching from the wooded hills of the Luxembourg, and the Ardennes, to the valleys of the Vosges, and from thence continued along the vine slopes of Burgundy, and the volcanic masses of the Cevennes, till it joins the prodigious wall of the Pyrenees. This line marks the separation of the waters. To the west of this line the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne flow towards the ocean;—behind it, the Meuse and the Moselle turn to the north, the Saone and the Rhone to the Mediterranean. In the far distance are discerned what seem two islands in this continent; Bretagne, rugged and low, simple quartz and granite, a solid breakwater placed at the corner of France to receive the shock of the Atlantic, and the currents of the Channel; in another direction rises the green Auvergne, the stiffened lava bed of forty extinct volcanoes. The basins of the Rhone and the Garonne, important as they are, are only secondary in this expanse of land. The life of this body is concentrated to the north. There the grand movements of the nations have taken place. The stream of mankind poured itself from Germany that way in ancient times. The great political struggle of modern times is between France and England. These two peoples stand, front to front, as in an attitude of defiance. England presents to France her Teutonic face, and withdraws into her rear-guard her Celts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. France, on the other hand, backed up by her German provinces, Lorraine and Alsace, opposes to England a Celtic front. Each country exhibits to the other its most hostile element. 'In latitude, the zones of France are easily marked by their products. In its northern zone the rich and wide plains of Flanders, with their crops of flax and rape, and the hop, that bitter vine of the north. About Rheims commences the real vine; all froth and effervescent in Champagne, rich and warm in Burgundy, it becomes heavy and stupifying in Languedoc, to recover its spirit at Bordeaux. At Montauban the mulberry and the olive begin to show themselves; but these tender |