ee 
1828. ] Dr. Granville's Travels to St. Petersburgh. 397 
after taking a view of the place, he starts in another steam-vessel for Cologne, 
where he arrives on Tuesday afternoon. Having rested the night, he again 
embarks at five in the morning of Wednesday in a third steamer, reaches 
Coblentz the same day, and is landed at Mayence on Thursday afternoon. 
If his business takes him to Frankfort, a fourth steam-vessel is ready to con- 
vey him-to that place on the same day, as two such vessels perform that 
distance twice daily. Or if Switzerland be the point of direction, the Fre- 
deric William steamer will convey him to Strasburgh in forty-four hours ; 
from whence, plunging into the Black Forest, a short journey by land takes 
him into the very heart of Switzerland. Such are the wonderful performances 
of steam in navigation! A man may breakfast in London on Saturday, take 
his supper at the Rémisch Kaiser on the Thursday evening following at 
Frankfort, and dine in some Swiss Canton on the succeeding Sunday! And 
all this at the moderate expense of from forty to fifty rix-dollars, or at the 
very utmost ten guineas. Who will not travel? 
Again: the doctor’s advice in what follows may safely be taken :— 
« A journey performed at the close of the summer, along the banks of the 
Rhine, is, beyond question, a source of the greatest enjoyment—one which, 
in my capacity of physician, I would not hesitate to place among the most 
powerful auxiliaries for the cure of bad stomachs and the blue deyils. I have 
now had two opportunities of witnessing its beneficial effects on the consti- 
tution of invalids whom I accompanied during such an excursion, and I speak 
therefore from experience. There is something so soothing, and at the same 
time inspiring, in the contemplation of the successive and magnificent pano- 
ramas which present themselves to our admiration at every step as we pro- 
ceed—that few nervous disorders can withstand its sanative power. I would 
say to the dyspeptic and the bilious—to those who labour under hypochon- 
driac diseases, and a sorry state of the digestive organs ; go not, in the sum- 
mer, to Brighton or Eastbourne—neither cockneyfy yourselves in the Isle of 
Thanet with aldermen’s wives and their rubicund children; but embark for 
Rotterdam in a steam packet ; pray heaven that you may be duly sea-sick ; 
run away from Holland as soon as you get to it, taking the direction to 
‘Cologne, by acending, in a pyroscaphe, the noble stream, in front of which I 
am writing the present observations ; and, once safely landed at that place, 
as having seen as much of it as is worth seeing, follow us on land to the city 
of Bonn.” 
The following anecdote and bon-mot, in connexion with Coblentz, are 
too good not to merit being better known than they are :— 
“We drove to the Hotel de Tréves, on the place of the same name, next 
door to the Theatre, not far off from the Poste, and in the vicinity, in fact, of 
every thing that is good and convenient in Coblentz. The hotel is of the best 
description. When Napoleon, in the year 1812, invaded Russia, the Préfet of 
Coblentz, locking to the possibility of getting into better quarters by flatter- 
ing the man to whose ears the flattery of even the meanest indivdual was 
Sweet music, caused a stone monument to be erected on the Grande Place, to 
commemorate the bold enterprise and its anticipated success. At the close 
of that campaign, which brought the assailed into the country of the assail- 
ants, the Russian General, who took possession of Coblentz, was soon 
informed of the existence of the presumptuous inscription on the monument, 
and was recommended to level it to the ground. But Josephowitch, who had 
‘more esprit than the Frenchman by whom the memorial had been erected, ordered, 
on the contrary, that it should remain, with the following laconic commentary, 
written in the very language of the French bureaucratie. “Vu et approuvé 
par le Général Commanvant Russe a Coblentz, Jossrpuowitcu.” This monu- 
ment, with its bitter appendix, is still in existence, and visited by every 
stranger.” 
