MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 283 



things that makes them the laughing- stock of intelligent foreigners (who, by 

 the way, are too well-bred to show it openly, as we too often do) and a dis- 

 grace to their own the greatest manufacturing and trading nation of Europe, 

 the medium of peaceful communication between all the members of the 

 European confederacy. Some of our readers may think that the matter is 

 overstated, that English travellers are not the selfish, prejudiced, merely sight- 

 seeing race that they are here represented. Our own opinion is before the 

 public put forth not without a keen and laborious investigation of facts. We 

 ask of those who have gone and staid abroad, and in the heart of the conti- 

 nent not at Paris or Brussels, or those towns were the more artificial man- 

 ners of society prevail already, but in the south of France, in Switzerland, 

 in southern Germany are these statements true or false ? Has not the increase 

 of foreign intercourse demoralized the rural population of the more accessible 

 and attractive parts of the continent ; and, what is more important to us as a 

 professingly moral nation, has not our influence, as recognized through our 

 representatives, contributed very largely to produce this baneful effect ? Sub 

 judice Us est. 



After so long and severe a stricture on foreign travel, it becomes us now to 

 perform the duty, which perhaps lies more within our province, of considering 

 the merits of the work in question. 



The reputation of the " American Magician" the man so invidiously put 

 forward by his countryman as the rival of the author of Waverly was so 

 great as to raise a degree of expectation in us which has not only been not 

 realized but has been miserably disappointed. We are aware that the situation 

 of a person who draws on the imagination of himself and his readers, and 

 paints the scenes which his country and his early habits have fixed indelibly 

 on his memory, is widely different from that of the person who faithfully re- 

 cords to a private friend ; but when a person whose love of the picturesque 

 enables him to invest the terrors of the ordinary storm at sea with the terrors 

 of a tornado, and to paint so beautifully, so seductively, but yet so falsely, 

 the charms of an American forest, goes abroad, and,with the candid confidence 

 that a friendly communication inspires, talks to us, as an English public, of 

 the Alps, its glaciers, and its passes, of Switzerland, its towns, villages, farm- 

 houses, and chalets, of the people with whom he meets and the travellers 

 whom he passes, we naturally expect something that shall repay the trouble 

 of perusal. We have not been repaid ; and we do not think that, if Mr. 

 Cooper had, with the feelings of a poet and as such we had ever considered 

 him applied himself to the strict investigation of the Alps, their rivers, val- 

 leys, and their passes, we should not have read the crude and unsatisfactory 

 notices which are given in these volumes respecting some of the most cele- 

 brated, though, nevertheless, not the finest and most picturesque passes of the 

 Alpine barriers. 



Mr. Cooper with his party entered Switzerland by Dijon, Pontarlier, and 

 across the Jura range, made way to Neuchatel, and thence to Berne, one of 

 the three great entrees to Switzerland known to our travelled countrmen. His 

 first trip to the mountains was to the Oberland Alps along the valley of the 

 romantic Aar, by the lake of Thun, the valleys of Lauterbrunnen, and Grinde- 

 wald, as far as the neighbourhood of the Jungfrau, whose highest summit 

 was surmounted the same year that our traveller was in the Alps. He re- 

 turned by nearly the same route to Berne, whence, in his second excursion, 

 he proceeded npthward to the Rhine, Schaffhausen, Lake of Constance, Frey- 

 berg, &c. He subsequently visited the Lake of the Four Cantons, Altorf, and 

 other parts of Switzerland. In leaving Switzerland he chose the route over 

 the Simplon. The journal closes on the author's arrival at Milan. 



It is perhaps rather unamiable to be severe in noticing the books of a de- 

 served favourite ; but from such a man we expected something of the first 

 character, and we have been disappointed. More sober matter-of-fact readers 

 than ourselves may still find much that is^ worthy of attention in these 

 volumes. 



