508 ENGLAND AND HEll CRITICS. 



mate art, the comforts of a house, the excellent condition of the roads, 

 and the convenience of conveyances to disarm the inclemency of 

 clime and weather. If at home, you have your well-appointed room, 

 your curtains, carpet, your well-made doors and windows totally im- 

 pervious to the wind ; your commodious, cheerful grate and blazing 

 fire : if you travel, your swift horses, fresh as the day-spring and as 

 sleek as sunbeams ; your cleanly coach ; your well-provided inn, a 

 model and compendium of all earthly comforts. Look on a rainy 

 day in France at home your sanded floors ; a cold, white winding- 

 sheet for curtains an ill-made smoking stove, the very counterpart 

 of misery ; your doors and windows yawning to the winds, the only 

 agents that enjoy the access to a French menage: If you travel, a 

 wooden house on waggon-wheels ; your horses lame, and wearied 

 from the plough, or from a turn or two of posting ; your harness, 

 whipcord, thong and rope, and rusted iron. Would you sleep upon 

 the road, your floor of brick or tiles and, saving those especial 

 houses appointed for a traveller's reception, and at an interval of four 

 leagues distance no other habitation that can yield you further cheer 

 than coarse, black bread, new wine as cold as ice (except in summer) 

 and as sour as vinegar, and eau de vie, comprising in one solitary glass 

 the fire and fury of Mount JEtna. To this plain, honest contrast, we 

 may add, " that the mortality of Great Britain, its cities, and its 

 hospitals, is greatly inferior to that of any other country in Europe ; 

 that it is at present incontestible that Great Britain is the most healthy 

 country with which we are acquainted, and that it has been gradually 

 tending to that point for the last fifty years ; that this superior 

 value of life in Great Britain is not confined to any particular districts 

 or classes of individuals. To whatever point we turn our view, the 

 advantage is still the same ; the man of affluence, the pauper-patient 

 of the hospital, the soldier and the sailor on active service, the prisoner 

 of war, the inmate of a gaol, all enjoy a better tenure of existence 

 from this country than from any other of which we have been able to 

 consult the records. It has long been the fashion, both abroad and 

 at home, to exhaust every variety of reproach on the climate of our 

 country, and particularly on the atmosphere of London ; and yet we 

 shall find that the most famed spots in Europe, the places which have 

 long been selected as the resort of invalids and the fountains of health, 

 are far more fatal to life than even this great metropolis. The annual 

 proportion of deaths at Montpellier was greater thirty years ago, and 

 is greater at present, than in London *." 



We are not disposed to controvert the Count on politics, or to 

 pursue him in his wanderings on democracy or aristocratical oppres- 

 sions he is eminently ignorant on either point ; but we will tell 

 him, by the way, that those delightful exhibitions which he has rather 

 daubed with an invidious, than sketched with a discriminating hand, 

 are derived in spirit and in form from the disgusting models which 

 the revolutionary fury of his own country so abundantly supplied ; 

 that they are the despicable excesses of the indolent and profligate in 



Dr. Hawkins' Medical Statistics. 



