6

The character of the Poles Mr. T. describes as bad, very bad;' and he subsequently adds: 'believe me, there is no liberty lost by the revolution of Poland.' This evidence comes from a man who, as all the readers of the "Prolusiones" will recollect, was not a lukewarm advocate in the cause of civil liberty.

The next letter to that which caused our last remarks is dated from Moscow, where the writer arrived while the court was residing in that antient capital. Of the present Lord Whitworth, who was then the British minister to the Emperor of Russia, he speaks in the highest terms; describing him as very superior to all those of our ministers at foreign courts whom he had seen on the Continent. It is to be observed, indeed, that of the corps diplomatique in general, and especially of his own countrymen who were members of it, Mr. T. was by no means inclined to entertain very favourable opinions; and in one of his letters, which we have purposely passed, he writes more freely of them to the eye of friendship than he probably would have thought of doing had he conjectured that his remarks would ever obtain publicity. The letter in question contains opinions that could not have been formed on much experience or reflection. The author had then seen very little of the Continent; and, were we to consider the sentiments there expressed, in which he censures very generally, as a rule by which we were to measure all future references to the same subject, it would be rather difficult to reconcile some of the praises which he bestows on individual ministers at the successive courts that he visited, with a sweeping declamation against the whole corps.

It will not be possible for us to give more than the simple route of the traveller in the northern countries: but, when we say, therefore, that from Moscow he proceeded to Petersburgh, thence to Stockholm by way of Finland, and, returning to Petersburgh, passed through Russia to the Crimea, we merely omit a few details with which the late travellers in those countries have furnished us in an ample measure.

At Sympheropol in the Crimea, Mr. Tweddell was an inmate in the house of the celebrated Professor Pallas; whence he took an interesting excursion among the mountains which command the Black-Sea. During this expedition, he informs his friend that he had found a great many antiquities and inscriptions relating to the time at which the Greeks were masters of that island, and after them the Genoese; and to the same letter he adds, as a postscript, I have made several tolerable drawings of all the most interesting views of this country, and I have copied all the inscriptions I have

found:'

found.' Dr. Clarke, in his travels in Tartary, &c., (Vol. i. p. 435.) bears testimony to the value of this collection, which has unfortunately shared the fate of Mr. Tweddell's other manuscripts; Professor Pallas having published our traveller's copies of the inscriptions, but without the power of adding those illustrations which he alone could have afforded. At the same place, Mr. Tweddell had the different costumes of the Tartars, Cossaks, Calmucks, &c. executed for him by a painter in the service of the Professor, in a masterly manner. We wish our readers to bear in mind the extent and nature of the different collections, and books of notes, to which we have referred, as it will be requisite in the sequel of this article to allude to them again.

Leaving the Crimea, we lose sight of our guide, until we meet him once more with the Duke de Polignac at Woitooka in the Ukraine; and here it may be necessary for us to overlook the traveller for a short time, and contemplate the man. A gradual change seems to have taken place in Mr. Tweddell's mind during the progress of his travels, which led him to look with indifference on those prospects and objects in life that he had once considered as the pursuits of laudable ambition; and a distaste for consequence in official stations, though he had originally imagined the diplomatic line to have been the one to which his habits and acquirements naturally led him, was an early source of his reflections. We consider a growing melancholy of disposition, arising possibly from living as an insulated being, although in the middle of society, (for he appears to have generally travelled alone,) to have been rather the cause than the result of this wish of abstraction from the active duties of life; and even the ambition of authorship, he somewhere says, had died away within him. How far this last might have been the sentiment of a moment, rather than the prevailing tone of his mind, it is difficult for us to judge: but we think it fair to argue that it must have been an intermittent feeling only, since it is otherwise difficult to conceive how the ardour, with which he pursued all literary acquirement, remained unabated to the last moments of his life. Some traces of the disposition of mind to which we refer will be found in an extract from a letter to his father.

The ambition which I once possessed is, nearly, if not quite, extinct; it was propagated first by successes at the University, rather extraordinary and, though I believe that its outward effects were not declared by either vanity or presumption, yet it continued to grow inwardly for some time longer, and to receive nourishment from the applauses which I received in the world from persons whose favourable opinion has been seen to intoxicate men both graver and older than myself. This is now passed by. I

think much the same as I ever did upon most of the subjects which I have at all considered attentively-but I am much less anxious about the influence of events upon myself, much more penetrated with the sense of those vanities of the great and little world, which I once thought deserving of attention. My wishes are more bounded, and my head and my heart are more calm. My enthusiasm is burnt out in a great degree; I find that there are few things in life worthy to be coveted with ardor; that it is, for the most part, a choice of evil, and that the villany and folly of the greater part of mankind furnish slender hope, to a cool calculator, of the good producible by the effects of the virtuous few. I believe that if there is any happiness to be found, it is in retreat; and the great and chief good which I feel to result from my daily observations upon every thing which has struck me for a long time past, is the idea that, at some future time, if ever I should enjoy tranquillity and repose (for happiness is too much to count upon), I shall reap from reflection upon what I have seen and felt, the solid conviction, that all which passes beyond the sphere of a contracted station is unworthy to excite a wish or a regret.'

Yet in a subsequent part of the same letter, although he shews a latent disinclination to any professional life, he offers to coincide with his father's views, should any thing transpire in the political line of which he might be able to avail himself. It was about this same time, and while still resident at Woitooka, that he announces in a letter to his friend Mr. Digby that he had ceased to eat flesh-meat, and to drink fermented liquors. From the latter he abstained merely as judging them to be injurious to his constitution; from the former, owing to some peculiar views which he entertained as to the moral propriety of this nearly universal usage. We are by no means inclined to follow him in his short reasonings on this question; which are little calculated by any force, or indeed novelty, to procure converts on the score of religious obligation, whatever they might do with a few on that of personal expediency. It does not appear that the Pythagoricien, as he was humourously called by the females of the Polignac family, ever resumed the use of this mode of sustenance: but wine he did occasionally taste afterward.

When Mr. Tweddell reached Constantinople, whither he next resorted, he was accommodated by Mr. Spencer Smythe, then envoy to the Porte, at the English palace, in the division of Pera. Here he continued to make notes, as in other places, either for the future amusement of his family or for the public at large; and he states that he had collected one hundred different dresses of that country, and had either taken or copied the greater part of the views in the neighbourhood. The constant contemplation of the miseries, which the French

had

had even then inflicted on the Continent, caused considerable alteration in his political opinions. I am the most decided enemy,' says he, of the great nation; their monstrous and diabolical conduct makes me ashamed that I ever could imagine that their motives were more pure, or their ends more salutary:' but, at the same time, he asserts that his opinions regarding our mode of beginning the war had undergone no change whatever. The peaceful occupations of the scholar and tourist, however, were not impeded; he continued to add to his collections, especially of drawings; and, as an auxiliary resource to his own labours, he procured several from M. Préaux, of whose execution in this art he speaks with much encomium: he had also obtained a considerable number of medals. From Constantinople he landed in Asia, but did not, as he had proposed, visit the plain of Troy; postponing that expedition until some future occasion, which Providence decreed should never arrive. He had likewise drawn for himself the outline of a more extended journey, to include Balbeck and Palmyra, with M. Préaux as a companion to assist in delineating those celebrated remains.-Relinquishing any farther progress in Asia for the present, he passed a short time in Tino and another island in the Archipelago, and arrived at Athens in December 1798. Of his occupations at a place from the antiquities of which he was so eminently qualified to receive the purest delight, he shall speak in his own words:

-

I find here every day something new to see and to admire. The antiquities of Athens give the highest ideas of the perfection to which human talent is capable of attaining. My companion is diligently employed in copying them, and I have already some very fine drawings of them in my portfolio. I have taken three chambers, and a kitchen annexed to them, in the house of a protégé of the English nation. My servant dresses dinner, and in a very excellent way. As for me, I continue to adhere to a diet which I have hitherto found so salutary cabbages, potatoes, cauliflowers, milk, eggs, and fruit, are my daily food; and, since the day that I abandoned flesh-meat, I have hardly had to complain of even so slight an indisposition as a head-ache. I am much cooler; I require less sleep; and support fatigue and heat without the slightest inconvenience which has not been the case of any other of my countrymen in this climate. To my dinner my servant has only to make a small addition of a more substantial nature for Mons. Préaux; and so we live, very economically, and very philosophically; solely intent upon the great objects which surround us. We rise early, and dine at five o'clock - the whole interval is employed in drawing, on one hand, and on the other, in considering the scenes of ancient renown, the changes which they have undergone, and the marks which yet distinguish them.

I shall

I shall certainly have the most valuable collection of drawings of this country which was ever carried out of it. Not only they will be valuable, as bringing to my own recollection the scenes which I have visited, and as conveying an exact and excellent idea of them to my friends in England; but, exclusively of that great consideration, they will be an object of solid and intrinsic price. My principal collection will be uniform, of drawings about 30 inches long. I shall have ten large ones, of the main temples and other most interesting objects of Greece, which will be about four feet and a half, or near five feet: one of these large ones is already finished, and a great part of the smaller size. Those of the large dimension are richly worth thirty guineas a piece—so that you will easily imagine nothing but the re-union of many extraor dinary circumstances could have enabled me to be attended by a person capable in other times of turning his talent to such account.'

His collection of inscriptions was now continually increas ing; and he flattered himself that he had ascertained with tolerable exactness many sites, which the Abbé Barthélemi had mis-calculated in his chart of antient Athens. It is some matter of consolation, in such a wreck of literary treasures, that Mr. Tweddell's corrections of Athenian topography have not shared the fate of his other works; he having communicated his discoveries on these subjects to Mr. Spencer Smythe, who presented the plans of Athens, antient and modern, to the Editor of this volume.-While thus enriching himself with the treasures of science and taste, the traveller received the melancholy intelligence of the destruction, as then reported, of Pera by fire; at which place, before his expedition to Athens, he had deposited, in the hands of Mr. Thornton, (a member of the English factory, and author of "The present State of Turkey,") two trunks containing, besides clothes, &c. all his papers and notes on the different countries through which he had passed, and these were, he says, very voluminous. Among other things, were one hundred drawings relating to Constantinople; as also his different journals, including those of Swisserland and the Crimea, which, he adds, were composed with much care: indeed, of the extent of these journals we may form some idea from their author's statement, when he says that it would require half a year of constant writing to transcribe the principal part of what he had already written,' p. 317. Independently of these precious effects, his portfolio at Athens contained fifty other views of Constantinople, more valuable than those which he imagined to be lost; fifty more of the Crimea; forty views of Athens; and one hundred and fifty drawings respecting the usages, ceremonies, and dresses of the people of Attica. Although, however, the greater