are the winds and meteors of Heaven; and every object appears as if seen "Through a glass, and darkly." This is the same prospect that De Saussure describes, as he saw it once from the Dole, but at another hour. A thick cloud had overspread the Lake of Geneva, the neighbouring hills, and even all the lower mountains. The summit of the Dole, and the highest Alps, alone raised their heads above this immense veil. A brilliant sun shone vertically down upon the whole surface of this cloud; and the Alps illuminated by his rays, as also by the light reverberated from this cloud, appeared in the greatest lustre; and were visible at a prodi gious distance. But this situation, he says, had something in it" terrible and strange. I thought I stood alone upon a rock in the midst of a billowy sea, at an immense distance from a continent bordered by a long reef of inaccessible cliffs." In the afternoon I went up alone to the Dent de Vauillon: it takes an hour's very fast climbing to reach this summit. The solitudes of the way-its being haunted by wolves or bears, and the wind twanging every now and then in your ears, startle you. Between the South and West points of the compass the whole valley of Joux lay in prospect before me. It exhibited the lake of Rousses, with the two others; while the intermediate river was weaving its shining way from lake to lake, with the movement of a silk-worm. The road by which we had come along the valley, seemed a loose-stretched cord. Westward lay France, whose ridges ran across my view far and wide, the extremity of them both ways being indiscernible; not only on account of the distance, but of the setting sunbeams that glared in my eyes. Towards the North there tempested a After having gazed at this sublime sea of mountains. Between the North spectacle on all sides, and contemand East you may descry a lake with plated it till my eyes were quite dim, a city at this end of it, probably I looked back on the West, and found Yverduu: farther to the right, specks that the sun had dropped below the or shadows, said to be lakes. A horizon. It was necessary to think broad and lofty mountain covers Orbe, of retiring; and though the descent and others again the Travers valley of the mountain was in my favour, All these objects, together with the yet before I could reach the town Vevay mountains, canton of Fribourg, it was dark. and glaciers of Berne, completed this quarter. : Between the Eastern and Southern points, you may observe a long and broad gleam, and the form of its lucid crescent marks it for no other than the Lake of Geneva. But one of its horns, being intercepted by a mountain, is darkened. Beyond lie the Alps of Savoy gathered round Mount Blanc; which last, though 30 miles distant, seems still towering near you. In short, the landscape is here placed like the model in relief of General Pfiffer; only that it is as large as Nature, and real-and that here every object appears indistinct from the distance, the lateness of the hour, and the mistiness of the air at this season. I never was so sensible in my life as here of a profound solitude. The earth, from these heights of the sky, seems another world; and the spectator is confined to a planet by himself. The only company you have GENT. MAG, Suppl. LXXXVI. PART II. B Mr. URBAN, Hackney, Sept. 9. SUBMIT for insertion the under, mentioned analogy between an Agricultural and a Commercial Country, or, in plain English, between Germany and England. It is copied from a popular pamphlet recently published in the City, and is the production of a sensible young German Merchant. "This Country is rich in real and fictitious wealth; but is burthened with an enormous National Debt, a papercurrency, and heavy taxes; its popula tion is condensed in large masses; the most unbounded luxury is contrasted by the most abject want; in fact, the state of society is artificial. Germany is comparatively poor, but has no debt, no paspread more equally over the whole surper, and few taxes; the population is face; there is not the same luxury, nor the same distress. In short, the state of society is more natural. In the one country the cunning artificer must earn wages to buy his dinner; in the other, the who have discovered some desert island, and I said to myself with no small self-complacency, "most assuredly I am the first mortal that ever placed his foot here." While I was pluming myself on this idea, I heard a sound close by that I thought I was no stranger to. I began to listen. The same noise was repeated, and became still louder. I started up with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, and made my way through briars and thorns towards the place whence the noise issued; when, about a hundred yards from the place where I had been thus musing, and fancying myself at the extremity of the world, I perceived a stocking-manufactory." He continues, "I cannot express the confused and contradictory emotions I felt upon this discovery. My first emotion was joy, at finding myself so unexpectedly among my fellow creatures. But who would have expected to meet with a manufactory in such a place! Switzerland is the only country in the world that exhibits this mixture of the wildest nature with civilization. All Switzerland is nothing, so to say, but a great city; whose long and broad streets are planted with forests, and intersected with mountains; and whose houses, insulated and scattered wide asunder, communicate, by English gardens only, with each other. Now we are upon this subject, I recollect another botanizing excursion that I made, along with Du Peyrou and a few others, not long ago, on the Chasseral; from whose summit no less than seven lakes are visible. There is only a single house on that mountain; but the inhabitant of it is a bookseller, and I was credibly assured he has plenty of business. It strikes me that a single fact of this kind serves to give a truer notion of Switzerland, than the accounts of any traveller whatsoever." View from Aubonne. The view from Aubonne compasses the Lake from end to end; but the Western end should be seen by the rising, and the Eastern by the setting suu. From the vast distance, the mouth of the Rhone is scarce discernible. Villeneuve, from the convexity of the Lake's surface, seemed immersed up to its very spires in the water. We remarked the glaciers of Mount Blanc, rising up on its volume in ridges. Its hue at sunset was that particular blush which is discernible between the folds of a white rose. The superiority of its height over the surrounding mountains is marked to every eye in the most striking manner the sun not setting to it until long after he had to every other. On the right extremity of the Lake, the situation of Geneva could be guessed at, only, by the smoke of its houses. Here the Lake becomes narrow for a long way like a river. Nearly under our feet was the town of Rolles. The roofs of its houses were no bigger than the divisions in honeycombs. Behind us, successively as the day departed, might be discerned the black-red purple of the Jura, next its grey-blue, then its darkest grey. The bank of the Vaud, from Vevay to Lausanne, undulates gently round by the shore; and, as soon as it arrives at the latter place, it sinks down, and is diffused into the vast plain poured around us on every side. The sight absolutely turns giddy as it glances round this rich variety of objects, the woods of oak, country villas, corn-fields, vineyards, and all the towns and villages of the Pays-de-Vaud. This view, shewing more the boundaries of the Lake than that from Lausanne, must of course leave less for the imagination. aspect, too, that the banks have bere, is neither so varied, nor so happy as at that place. And yet it was at this spot that Tavernier, the universal traveller, fixed his residence, as the most beautiful point of view in the known world. View from the Dent de Vauillon. The The next morning, at four, we began to ascend the Jura. The sun was in a rough sea of cloud-work, which his beams pierced through with veins in a crystalized form, of the colour of carbuncle. The ascents of the Jura are made practicable even for a carriage. At every step we rose, the Alps were extended and multiplied on all sides: but Mount Blanc might be observed heaving up above the rest, and surging in the skies, to a vast height. At the same time, what the prospect gains in compass, it loses in distinctness. The horizon widens its ring, so as to encompass far beyond the lake of Neufchatel. We admired the fine bend of the Jura's outline lengthened lengthened down into the plains below. are the winds and meteors of Heaven; and 1 every object appears as if seen "Through a glass, and darkly." This is the same prospect that De Saussure describes, as he saw it once from the Dole, but at another hour. A thick cloud had overspread the Lake of Geneva, the neighbouring hills, and even all the lower mountains. The summit of the Dole, and the highest Alps, alone raised their heads above this immense veil. A brilliant sun shone vertically down upon the whole surface of this cloud; and the Alps illuminated by his rays, as also by the light reverberated from this cloud, appeared in the greatest lustre; and were visible at a prodigious distance. But this situation, he says, had something in it "terrible and strange. I thought I stood alone upon a rock in the midst of a billowy sea, at an immense distance from a continent bordered by a long reef of inaccessible cliffs." In the afternoon I went up alone to the Dent de Vauillon: it takes an hour's very fast climbing to reach this summit. The solitudes of the way-its being haunted by wolves or bears, and the wind twanging every now and then in your ears, startle you. Between the South and West points of the compass the whole valley of Joux lay in prospect before me. It exhibited the lake of Rousses, with the two others; while the intermediate river was weaving its shining way from lake to lake, with the movement of a silk-worm. The road by which we had come along the valley, seemed a loose-stretched cord. Westward lay France, whose ridges ran across my view far and wide, the extremity of them both ways being indiscernible; not only on account of the distance, but of the setting sunbeams that glared in my eyes. Towards the North there tempested a sea of mountains. Between the North and East you may descry a lake with a city at this end of it, probably I Yverdun farther to the right, specks or shadows, said to be lakes. A broad and lofty mountain covers Orbe, and others again the Travers valley All these objects, together with the Vevay mountains, canton of Fribourg, and glaciers of Berne, completed this quarter. : Between the Eastern and Southern points, you may observe a long and broad gleam, and the form of its lucid crescent marks it for no other than the Lake of Geneva. But one of its horns, being intercepted by a mountain, is darkened. Beyond lie the Alps of Savoy gathered round Mount Blanc; which last, though 30 miles distant, seems still towering near you. In short, the landscape is here placed like the model in relief of General Pfiffer; only that it is as large as Nature, and real—and that here every object appears indistinct from the distance, the lateness of the hour, and the mistiness of the air at this season. I never was so sensible in my life as here of a profound solitude. The earth, from these heights of the sky, seems another world; and the spectator is confined to a planet by himself. The only company you have GENT. MAG. Suppl. LXXXVI. PART II. B After having gazed at this sublime spectacle on all sides, and contemplated it till my eyes were quite dim, looked back on the West, and found that the sun had dropped below the horizon. It was necessary to think of retiring; and though the descent of the mountain was in my favour, yet before I could reach the town it was dark. Mr. URBAN, Hackney, Sept. 9. SUBMIT for insertion the under mentioned analogy between an Agricultural and a Commercial Country, or, in plain English, between Germany and England. It is copied from a popular pamphlet receptly published in the City, and is the production of a sensible young German Merchant. "This Country is rich in real and fictitious wealth; but is burthened with an enormous National Debt, a papercurrency, and heavy taxes; its popula tion is condensed in large masses ; the most unbounded luxury is contrasted by the most abject want; in fact, the state of society is artificial. Germany is comparatively poor, but has no debt, no paper, and few taxes; the population is spread more equally over the whole surface; there is not the same luxury, nor the same distress. In short, the state of society is more natural. In the one country the cunning artificer must earn wages to buy his dinner; in the other, the the simple cultivator of the soil must grow it. The same causes will produce the same effects in every age and clime. England then may be said to be covered with a rich mould, in which all the virtues ripen to great perfection (an English Gentleman is admitted to be the most perfect of human beings); but in this mould the vices also luxuriate with unexampled rankness, to prove which we need not travel out of the record. Germany, on the contrary, has no depth of soil, in which either great virtues or vices can strike deep root. We meet there seldom with such instances of elevated benevolence, patriotism, gene. rosity, &c. as are very common in this Country; but we neither meet with instances of such desperate depravity.There is in a poor country neither the same incitement nor the same temptation to commit crime as in a rich one. A pickpocket seldom pilfers to satisfy the cravings of hunger; and he probably would not think of committing a crime, were it not for the alluring temptation of the gold watch, with its ponderous appendages. Vice, in England, has the virulence of the small-pox; in Germany, the mildness of the Vaccine. All this might be made still more evident; but enough, I trust, has been said, to make it comprehensible to the humblest capacity, that lenity to vice may be conducive to the cause of virtue in Germany, when it would become destructive to society in England." It has frequently occurred to my thoughts, that, circumstanced as the United States of America are, with an immense Continent and line of coast, their attention should be solely confined to Agriculture and their own Coasting Trade, in order to become a permanently great people; without any intercourse whatever of a commercial nature with Europe by their own shipping-leaving the navigation of the Atlantic open entirely to European shipping-and laying a duty on all importations in foreign bottoms: these duties would be the means of lessening the taxes, and their non-intercourse by their own vessels would prevent their being embroiled with European politicks, leaving them perfectly free and independent of all that refined political management now become so necessary in all European States. - If we begin with the Plough and the Loom, we can easily trace the various bearings of Agriculture and Commerce in States, up to the zenith to which we are arrived; and it is not a difficult matter to discover the difference in point of permanency and simplicity between them. the Continent of North America: on I draw three imaginary lines through, the coast; the middle settlements; and the back settlements. On the first are settled inhabitants, bearing a similarity of thought and action to ourselves, imbibing some prejudices arising from circumstances that perhaps cannot be well avoided. Envy is too common an appendage of the human heart- we know it. -we feel it-and it produces a struggle in the generous mind to rid itself of it: we cannot then be surprised to find it general in those who might have left their Country under circumstances of a painful or an embarrassed nature; and the same impressions descend to the next generation: hence is to be traced that desire to become a Naval and a Commercial People, almost in opposition to, and envy of ourselves. It is showy, I grant; but it is not ju dicious; because their powers of settlement are immense, and it must and will produce equal jealousies, and ultimately the evils attendant on competition and political disputes. The Middle Settlements are inhabited by persons from all nations, and these are all agriculturists, but unhappily not sufficiently attentive to those improvements that are rapidly gaining in all well-informed States a listlessness of action, and a fondness for politicks, over-rule too much the attention that might otherwise be paid to improvements. The third line is in the Woods, i. e. borderers of the immense forest. Placed almost out of civilization, and beyond the influence of, and submission to, human laws, it is not sur prising to find persons almost embracing the barbarism of the savage, in the ferociousness of their conduct and callousness of their minds. To justify this remark, permit me to add, that the first time I was ever on a Jury, and, a young man, was to sit on a trial for murder, a Virginian back settler, or, agreeably to the language of the Country, "a Cracker," had placed the muzzle of his rifle in the interstices of a log-house, and coolly shot a man dead seated at his own hearth, to obtain the wife: with a judgment convinced, but with trem 1 bling lips, I pronounced the verdict, Guilty; he expressed his surprise unmoved, and with the same indifference was executed. For once in my life, I felt it my duty to attend, and see the effects of a Jurors' verdict. Taking, therefore, into consideration the extent of this vast region; the line of coast it enjoys; the countless multitude of inhabitants it can support; I cannot but conceive that by keeping themselves distinct, and by attending to Agriculture and the Coasting Trade only, the American States would become a powerful and a permanent State. Unhappily, however, for us imortals, restlessness of action and various other evil passions so beset us, as to produce other pursuits than those that are best calculated for the happiness of man. Yours, &c. Mr. URBAN, T. WALTERS. Nov. 30. THE - Twenty years ago there stood a his wife ready to lie-in again. In this state he applied to Mr. Fairfax, and told him that if he would let him have a little bit of ground by the road-side, "he would show him the fashions on it." The slip of land for which he asked was exactly a rood: Mr. Fairfax, after inquiring into his character, suffered him to have it; the neighbours lent him some little assistance in the carriage of his materials; he built his house, enclosed the ground with a single row of quickset, which he cut down six times when it was young, and planted the garden. The manner in which he set to work, and the way in which the work was performed, pleased Mr. Fairfax so much, that he told him he should be rent-free. His answer, as Sir Thomas Bernard justly says, deserves to be remembered. "Now, Sir, you have a pleasure in seeing my cottage and garden neat: and why should not other Squires have the same pleasure in seeing the cottages and gardens as nice about them? The poor would then be happy, and would love them, and the place where they lived: but now every nook of land is to be let to the great farmers, and nothing left for the poor but to go to the parish.” "Though my visit," says Sir Thomas, 6 was unexpected, and he at the latter end of his Saturday's work, his clothes were neat and sufficiently clean. His countenance was healthy and open; he was a little lame in one leg, the conse quence of exposure to wet and weather. He said he had always worked hard and well; but he would not deny but that he had loved a mug of good ale when he could get it. When I told him my object in inquiring after him, that it was have cottages and gardens as neat as his, in order that other poor persons might and that he must tell me all his secret how it was to be done, he seemed extremely pleased, and very much affected. He said nothing would make poor folks more happy than finding that great folks thought of them that he wished every poor man had as comfortable a home as his own-not but that he believed there might be a few thoughtless fellows who would not do good in it."", Britton Abbot was at this time sixty-seven, and had lived happily with his wife for five-and-forty years. He earned from twelve to eighteca shillings a week by task-work; "but to be sure," he said, "I have u grand character |