and certainly the greater number, though merely chatting together, appeared to be enjoying themselves greatly. In short, it was like an ordinary assembly, seated in different parts of a large drawing-room, with only the queer addition of hot water as a medium of communication! In a low gallery extending along the four sides of the bath, sat groups of other persons, friends of the invalids, who, without entering the water, lent their society to keep up the spirits of the patients, whom the protracted discipline of this strange method of cure requires to remain soaking from eight to ten hours a-day!

Captain Hall never dwells long on any one subject. True to the title of his book, it abounds in variety. He has a happy facility in passing at once

'From grave to gay, from lively to severe.'

Our next notice will be directed to scenes at once 'gay' and 'lively,' and such as are well suited to this brilliant counterpane of Patchwork. They represent Paris at Midsummer-in Winter -and in Spring.' The colours are here in due keeping, and the sketches are delineated with a masterly hand. We cannot therefore do better than give a very brief extract from each of these seasons. To begin with Midsummer. The Tuileries gardens, with their whole army of chairs, are said to be quite perfect in all respects except two open space and green grass. Indeed, throughout 'the whole of the pleasure-grounds of Paris, excepting only the gardens of Tivoli, there is not a blade of grass to refresh the eye, or yield relief to the scorched soles of the feet.' And this, together with its causes, is illustrated by the following lively description:

I have been roasted under the vertical sun of Calcutta, baked in the close land winds of Madras, and been boiled in the swampy vapours of Batavia; but no intertropical cooking I have ever experienced comes near to the dressing one gets in the month of July in Paris. In the narrow streets you are suffocated; in the wide ones you are grilled alive ; or if you fly to the Champs Elysées, you are speedily choked with dust. Within doors your rooms become more like kilns for drying grain, than apartments for living beings. If you shut out the light and heat, you expire for want of air; but if, in agony, you open the creaking casement for a moment, you think the "fierce blast of the Simoom " is coming in upon you. The vegetation being all withered np, the eye finds no repose, for the rays of the sun are reflected from every object upon which they fall, and every object being white, it is impossible to look in any direction without being dazzled. The sky, no longer blue, is filled with a white, fiery sort of haze; while from the parched and cracked ground there arises a visible stream of liquid heat, an optical deception caused by the lower stratum of air in contact with the burning soil becoming lighter, and, in consequence, changing places with that above it, which,

in its turn, pours down to the earth to be heated and raised up to supply red-hot breath to the panting inhabitants of the capital.'

The history of the poor hackney-coach horse, at the same season of the year, terminating a life of misery by a death of igno'miny,' is so like the fate of our own, that we may pass it over; and if summer be bad for both man and beast, let us take a peep at winter, which is said to be even less bearable.' Captain Hall experienced one, which, so far from being a good, honest, 'brawny, moderate degree of cold,' he found to be hard and dry, 'and so biting, merciless, and snarly, that there was no possi'bility of escaping its searching intensity.'

How the wretched coachmen manage to live at all in such weather as I have seen in Paris, is to me inconceivable; for even to the inside passengers the cold becomes at times so severe, that with all the contrivances they can think of-warm furs, hot-water bottles, great-coats, boat-cloaks, and shawls, they can scarcely go from one house to another without being frozen to death,—a fate which actually befell two poor sentries, and an unfortunate donkey, one bitter night of the winter alluded to. The soldiers were found at the hour of their relief, as it is called, with their muskets shouldered, standing as stiff and erect at their post at the palace-gate, as when their corporal had planted them. The honest donkey was found standing across the path in the Boulevards at daybreak, with his tail straight on end, as rigid as a bar! In his death he retained his wonted look of patience and contentment so completely, that the people, thinking him still alive, drubbed him soundly for being in the way.

It would be difficult to decide whether the streets of Paris are the least passable in frost, snow, or a thaw. The omnibuses, 'coaches, and cabs, floundered along with their horses' bellies at ' times touching the water, and flinging this sea of mud to the right and left, in the most fearful explosions; while the hapless ' and distracted foot-passengers had enough to do to escape being 'driven over, if the middle way was followed; or if they adhered 'to the side, and coasted along the walls, they were sure to be ' covered with dirt from head to foot. In addition to the misery ' of being thus splashed upon by the floundering cattle, the 'poor pedestrians were liable to get drenched to the skin by the ' countless and unavoidable "jets d'eau" from the house-tops, if 'they kept too close.'

Now follows the best and liveliest of the scenes which Paris produces.

'But when the merriest of merry springs bursts forth, which it does. suddenly, all the world of Paris rush out of doors, and remain out so perseveringly that one might think they lived in the streets and gardens. I have often thought how copious an index is furnished to the domes

VOL. LXXIII. NO. CXLVII.

D

tic misery they must suffer by being forcibly detained in-doors in winter, by contrasting it with the intense enjoyment of their out-of-doors spring. The Tuileries' Gardens, the Champs Elysées, the Bois de Boulogne, and the Tivoli Gardens, are their chief places of resort. In the Palais Royal, too, along the whole circuit of the Boulevards, and in some other minor "places or open spots, in the heart of the city, the Parisians congregate in the air, in thousands and tens of thousands. The men almost buried in piles of newspapers dimly seen through clouds of smoke from their segars, inhale each other's tobacco fumes, and interchange political prejudices with a degree of animation which, to the uninitiated, looks like quarrelling, but is merely what they call conversation. The women, clad with a degree of elegance of dress, are still further removed from the imitation of foreigners. They are generally ranged in groups under the trees, armed with their work, and thrice happy in the interchanged clatter of gossip which rings along the ground, emulating the chirping sounds of the merry birds among the leaves overhead.'

In a piece of Patchwork we must not expect to meet only with the gay and the lively, or that every part of it should be couleur de rose; but it is not the most agreeable thing in the world to have the eye suddenly fixed on a dark spot, that might as well have been left out, such as we find in the fifth chapter (of the second volume),-entitled, The Gallows and the Guillotine,'describing, in the former, the execution of Thistlewood and his fellow-traitors before Newgate, and, in the latter, the decapitation of some unknown criminal in Paris. We shall not offend our readers with the details of these horrible and disgusting proceedings, after so many years from the period of the facts; we shall merely state that Captain Hall gives the preference to the long and humiliating exhibition which takes place in England, to the momentary process of quickly separating the head from the body, according to the practice in France. The feelings or the delicacy of Captain Hall, or both, are shocked by the quantity of blood that is shed in the latter process-blood on the scaffoldblood in the baskets-blood in the streets. We have not ourselves seen an exhibition of this nature; but we have understood from those who have recently witnessed it, that the great quantity of saw-dust prepared for the occasion, is quite sufficient to absorb the whole of the blood that is shed, which, after all, is not much.

Our author is evidently most at home amidst mountain scenery, whether primitive or volcanic-the Alps or Etna. We have seen him on the former, and we shall now follow him to the latter. Beginning at Catania-that devoted city to the destructive lava torrents from Mount Etna, whose inhabitants appear quite unconscious of their danger, though at any time an

eruption of the mountain may bury it in ruins-he decided on making a tour of the base of the mountain, before going to the top. These thoughtless Catanians are, however, so bent upon amusement, that the loudest roaring of the crater, he says, would give them no disturbance in the pursuit or enjoyment of them.

'As soon as the night set in, we were entertained-or I should say, horribly disturbed-by a series of processions, bands of music, fireworks, and above all, by the most confounded clatter of church-bells that ever cracked the ear of mortal man. These distracting noises were mingled with the sound of human voices from the thousands-I may say tens of thousands of people assembled in the streets, all talking or laughing, or bawling to one another, at the full stretch of their lungs-some in anger, more in mirth-but all in high spirits, and under a blaze of torches and other lights. Such a Babel I never met with before. Sleep, or rest of any kind, was totally out of the question!'

It is, as Captain Hall justly observes, a pleasure accompanied with melancholy to look upon this smiling and amusing sceneto see the unconscious enjoyment of the population, basking in the sunshine of the warmest fertility, not recollecting or caring to think, in the midst of their amusement, that not very long ago sixteen thousand of the inhabitants of Catania were deprived of life in one instant by the falling ruins of their own houses-stricken down by an earthquake; and still more recently the greater part of the town has been crushed to pieces under a stream of lava. Leaving Catania, the first town he reached in his progress was Aderno, a poor place. The next day brought him to BronteNelson's Bronte-where an estate, as well as the title, was conferred on him; but both the town and the estate were nearly obliterated by a flood of lava in 1832. About twenty months 'before our visit,' says Captain Hall, the inhabitants of Bronte 'were thrown into the greatest terror by an eruption of Etna, in 'the flank just above them, from an opening in which a stream ' of lava came almost upon their houses. Had it not stopped 'when it did, it must have gone right over the town, and 'smashed it as easily as a broad-wheeled waggon would do an 'old woman's basket of eggs.' He thinks that, of all the towns at the base of Mount Etna, poor Bronte appeared as being the most inevitably doomed to speedy destruction-and that it now only waits for one good stream to fill the valley entirely, burying the place fifty fathoms under the surface.

6

But Captain Hall tells us, that of all the expeditions that may be undertaken on the sides of Mount Etna, there is none " comparable for interest of every kind with that of the Val de

Bove,' and that it is extraordinary it has been so little visited. Dr Buckland, it seems, was the first English geologist who examined this valley with care, and reported it to be more worthy of attention than any single spot in Sicily, or perhaps in Europe. It is a huge steep-sided circular scoop or depression, on the eastern side of Mount Etna, about five miles in diameter, and from three to five thousand feet in the height of its bounding precipices, which are in most places nearly perpendicular. The faces of this enormous natural amphitheatre are every where marked by vertical walls of lava, which intersect the strata; and these dykes usually stand out in relief, and sometimes many yards beyond the cliffs which they traverse. We should say this scooped out amphitheatre, bating its torrents of lava and its size, resembles, in its shape, the Devil's Punchbowl' on the Surrey Downs, but only about one-tenth of its dimensions, and the product of water instead of fire.

In the view which Captain Hall takes of these torrents of lava, he has been describing some of several miles in length, and three or four hundred feet in thickness. We look at them,' he says, 'as characteristic of the region where all is black and bare, with' out a trace or possibility of vegetation.'

'But when we observe such fierce-looking monsters traversing the gentle slopes below, topping with merciless sweep the vine and orangeclad knolls, and obliterating hundreds of acres of corn-fields, demolishing chestnut forests, careering over and utterly crushing large towns, filling up valleys, and burying hills, we feel a totally different emotion. At all events, I must own that I never, by any amount of experience, became reconciled, or even accustomed, to the sight of a lava stream— as black as pitch, smoking hot, rugged, shapeless, totally without verdure, and apparently without a chance of ever bearing a blade of grass -intruding itself amongst gardens and green fields, and ruining the graceful beauties of a southern landscape. It would not be more incongruous to tumble a cart-load of live coals into the midst of a drawingroom-upsetting and breaking to pieces the supper tables, burning up the carpets and chairs, and driving the half-suffocated company into the streets for shelter.

Your philosopher steps in and tells us that all this is for the best, and that in due time these very streams of lava and showers of dust, the cause of so much present mischief, become the sources of a far greater fertility than existed before; and that new towns and villages, more wealthy and beautiful than their buried predecessors, will rise above them: but I could never find the stupid Sicilians much influenced by this reasoning when the growling of the volcano threatened an outbreak.'

The ascent of Etna has been so frequently made, that we shall