1827.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



197 



degradation and ultimate beggary. The 

 guardsman marries the daughter, and gets 

 a will in his favour ; and then neglects the 

 lather. 



By and by the old gentleman falls sick, 

 and is sent to Bath, where his son was 

 then residing. By sundry little contri- 

 vances on the part of their friends, the 

 son's wife our favourite is introduced 

 as his nurse; and reconciliation follows, 

 and the property, of course, in due time. 



Through the whole tale, an entire fa- 

 miliarity with the ways of fashionable life 

 is either carefully implied, or ostenta- 

 tiously exhibited. This is become quite 

 an indispensable qualification and of 

 course the great must soon write their 

 own tales. The silver forks are not for- 

 gotteneating with a knife, &c. &c. 



High-ways and By-ways; third Series, 

 3 vols. 12wo. 1827. There is a large class 

 of writers of imagination, as they are 

 called, who are the most complete matter- 

 of-fact people in the world, and who ma- 

 nage to deceive themselves and others, 

 respecting the bent of their intellect so 

 grossly as they do, by the mere substitu- 

 tion of novel titles to their books, instead 

 of calling them openly and honestly by 

 the only name to which they can fairly 

 assert a right namely, journals. 



Among this class, however, are to be 

 found some few individuals, who, notwith- 

 standing that the predominant qualities of 

 their genius are essentially of the news- 

 paper kind, possess not only those quali- 

 ties in a very transcendent degree, but 

 many of the noblest properties of the hu- 

 man mind more abundantly than the gene- 

 rality of men. The writer of High-ways 

 and By-ways is a brilliant sample of his 

 tribe, whose general aim it is to throw a 

 dash of the romantic, as an auxiliary and 

 embellishment, into the narrative, but to 

 whom the task of constructing a story 

 wholly rooted in fiction, and relying upon 

 the creative soul alone, would be like that 

 of the poor Israelites to make bricks 

 without straw. He possesses, neverthe- 

 less, very powerful claims upon our admi- 

 ration on many accounts. His descriptions 

 of scenery are occasionally magnificent, 

 and imbued with the fervid delight which 

 travellers may well feel in gazing on the 

 splendid operations of nature. His lan- 

 guage is at once correct, striking, felici- 

 tous possessing an uncommon union of 

 vigour and fulness, and sometimes a few 

 sentences, and now and then a whole page, 

 bespeak a deeper philosophy than we at 

 first gave him credit for, till it burst sud- 

 denly upon us from the midst of his more 

 superficial excellencies ; while the cha- 

 racters are by no means exceptionable on 

 the score of probability, but precisely 

 men and women of ordinary life the very 



heroes and heroines not wanting in the 

 shrewdness necessary to prevent their 

 walking into wells. 



The Cagot's Hut the best of the three 

 contained in this series is a Spanish re- 

 miniscence. We will just glance over the 

 story, in order to introduce at its conclu- 

 sion an interesting scene, in the writer's 

 own vivid words. In 1822, our author 

 visits Spain, and wanders late in the au- 

 tumn over the Pyrenees, to behold on a 

 grand scale the decline of nature. Bril- 

 liant days, however, intervene, amid the 

 general decay. The army of observation 

 stretched along the mountains from sea to 

 sea, and filled the villages with French 

 soldiers. The expelled bands of the faith 

 were hovering about the borders, singly, or 

 in small detachments. The constitutional- 

 ists were collecting their forces in the same 

 vicinity, and enlivened the scene by fre- 

 quent skirmishes with the supporters of 

 the faith. 



Our Englishman, not liking exactly the 

 promiseuous company of his hostelry at 

 Gedro ; and his appetite for the romantic 

 being awakened, by hearing that the 

 neighbourhood of the adjoining valley of 

 Heas, or rather the eminences that rise 

 around it, thronged with the huts of the 

 Cagot race, from whom the rest of the 

 world shrank away as from contagion, 

 it comes into his English and heterodox 

 head that he would even take up his abode 

 for a while, among these loathed and de- 

 graded beings, for the sake of studying 

 their character expecting, of course, to 

 find them angels in disguise. 



These Cagots of the Pyrenees, we must 

 remind our readers, are precisely the cre- 

 tins of the Valais, and the cahets of Gui- 

 eune, and Gascony, and Bearne, and gene- 

 rally of the marshy lands of the west of 

 France. The Cagots, of whom we are 

 now speaking', exist in some of the gorges 

 of the Pyrenees in frightful numbers. 

 They are goitred, diseased, and stunted j 

 imbecile, mentally and bodily, and lying 

 under inexorable and iron disabilities, 

 arising from the prejudices of their fellow- 

 creatures. Even war, whose necessities 

 break through so many prejudices, had 

 not rendered the dwellings of these chil- 

 dren of misery less objects of aversion 

 and disgust, or mitigated the caution, with 

 which they were universally shunned. 



Our hero is, therefore, very happily fur- 

 nished with an opportunity, delightful to 

 John Bull, of ascertaining and proving, 

 by personal inspection, that an inter- 

 course with the Cagot worthies would not 

 only be very tolerable, but absolutely a 

 thing to be desired by all parties ; and, 

 although the rest of the world for ages 

 had instinctively agreed upon the pro- 

 priety of leaving them to themselves, he 

 would not have it so ; but they must come, 



