From HANOVER to BRUSSELS.
Travelling night and day through the most dismal country I ever yet beheld, brought us at length to Munster, where we had a good inn again, and talked English. Well may all our writers agree in celebrating the miseries of Westphalia! well may they, while the wretched inhabitants, uniting poverty with pride, live on their hogs, with their hogs, and like their hogs, in mud-walled cottages, a dozen of which together is called by courtesy a village, surrounded by black heaths, and wild uncultivated plains, over which the unresisted wind sweeps with a velocity I never yet was witness to, and now and then, exasperated perhaps by solitude, returns upon itself in eddies terrible to look on. Well, the woes of mortal man are chiefly his own fault; war and ambition have depopulated the country, which otherwise need not I believe be poor, as here is capability enough, and the weather, though stormy, is not otherwise particularly disagreeable. January is no mild month any where; even Naples, so proverbially delicious, is noisy enough with thunder and lightning; and the torrents of rain which often fall at this season at Rome and Florence, make them unpleasing enough. Nor do I believe that the very few people one finds here are of a lazy disposition at all; but it is so seldom that one meets with the human face divine in this Western side of Germany, that one scarce knows what they are, but by report.
The town of Munster is catholic I see; their cathedral heavily and clumsily adorned, like the old Lutheran church called Santa Sophia at Dresden. One pair of their silver candlesticks however are eight feet high, and exhibit more solidity than elegance. They told us something about the three kings, who must have lost their way amazingly if ever they wandered into Westphalia, and deserved to lose their name of wise men too, I think. We were likewise shewn the sword worn by St. Paul, they told us, and a backgammon table preserved behind the high altar, I could not for, my life find out why; at first our interpreter told us, that the man said it had belonged to John the Baptist, but on further enquiry we understood him that it was once used by some Anabaptists; as that seemed no less wild a reason for keeping it there, than the other seemed as an account of its original, we came away uninformed.
Of the reason why Hams are better here than in any other part of Europe, it was not so difficult to obtain the knowledge, and the inquiry was much more useful.
Poor people here burn a vast quantity of very fine old oak in their cottages, which, having no chimney, detain the smoke a long time before it makes its escape out at the door. This smoke gives the peculiar flavour to that bacon which hangs from the roof, already fat with the produce of the same tree growing about these districts in a plenty not to be believed. Indeed the sole decoration of this devasted country is the large quantity of majestic timber trees, almost all oak, living to such an age, and spreading their broad arms with such venerable dignity, that it is they who appear the ancient possessors of the land, who, in the true style of Gothic supremacy, suck all the nutriment of it to themselves, only shaking off a few acorns to content the immediate hunger of the animal race, which here seems in a state of great degeneracy indeed, compared to those haughty vegetables.
This day I saw a fryar; the first that has crossed my sight since we left the town of Munich in Bavaria. On the road to Dusseldorp one sees the country mend at every step; but even I can perceive the language harsher, the further one is removed from Hanover on either side: for Hanover, as Madame de Bianconi told me at Dresden, is the Florence of Germany; and the tongue spoken at that town is supposed, and justly, the criterion of perfect Teutsch.
The gallery of paintings here shall delay us but two or three days; I am so very weary of living on the high roads of Teuchland all winter long! Gerard Dow’s delightful mountebank ought, however, to have two of those days devoted to him, and here is the most capital Teniers which the world has to show. Jaques Jordaens never painted any thing so well as the feast in this gallery, where there are likewise some wonderful Sckalkens; besides Rembrandt’s portrait of himself much out of repair, and old Franck’s Seven Acts of Mercy varnished up, as well as the martyrdoms representing some of the persecutions in early times of Christianity; these might be called the Seven Acts of Cruelty—a duplicate of the picture may be seen at Vienna. When one has mentioned the Vanderwerfs, which are all sisters, and the demi-divine Carlo Dolce in the window, representing the infant Jesus with flowers, full of sweetness and innocent expression, it will be time to talk of the General Judgment, painted with astonishing hardihood by Rubens, and which we stopt here chiefly to see. The second Person of the Trinity is truly sublime, and formed upon an idea more worthy of him, at least more correspondent to the general ideas than that in Cappella Sestini; where a beholder is tempted to think on Julius Cæsar somehow, instead of Jesus Christ—a Conqueror, more than a Saviour of mankind.
St. Michael’s figure is incomparable; those of Moses and St. Peter happily imagined; the spirit of composition, the manner of grouping and colouring, the general effect of the whole, prodigious! I know not why he has so fallen below himself in the Madonna’s character; perhaps not imitating Tintoret’s lovely Virgin in Paradise, he has done worse for fear of being servile. Tintoret’s idea of her is so very poetical! but those who shewed it me at Venice said the drawing was borrowed from Guariento, I remember.
Who however except Rubens would have thought so justly, so liberally, so wisely, about the Negro drawn up to heaven by the angels? who still retains the old terrestrial character, so far as to shew a disposition to laugh at their situation who on earth tormented him. When all is said, every body knows very well that Michael Angelo’s picture on this subject is by far the finest; and that neither Rubens nor Tintoret ever pretended, or even hoped to be thought as great artists as he: but though Dante is a sublimer poet than Tasso, and Milton a writer of more eminence than Pope, these last will have readers, reciters, and quoters, while the others must sit down contented with silent veneration and acknowledged superiority.
This day we saw the Rhine—what rivers these are! and what enormous inhabitants they do contain! a brace of bream, and eels of a magnitude and flavour very uncommon except in Germany, were our supper here. But the manners begin I see to fade away upon the borders; our soft feather beds are left behind; men too, sometimes sad, nasty, ill-looked fellows, come in one’s room to sweep, &c. and light the fire in the stove, which is now always made of lead, and the fumes are very offensive; no more tight maids to be seen: but we shall get good roads; at Liege, down in a dirty coal pit, the bad ones end I think; and that town may be said to finish all our difficulties. After passing through our last disagreeable resting-place then, one finds the manners take a tint of France, and begins to see again what one has often seen before. The forests too are fairly left behind, but neat agriculture, and comfortable cottages more than supply their loss. Broom, juniper, every English shrub, announce our proximity to Great Britain, while pots of mazerion in flower at the windows shew that we are arrived in a country where spring is welcomed with ceremony, as well as received with delight. The forwardness of the season is indeed surprising; though it freezes at night now and then, the general feel of the air is very mild; willows already give signs of resuscitation, while flights of yellowhammers, a bird never observed in Italy I think, enliven the fields, and look as if they expected food and felicity to be near.
Louvaine would have been a place well worth stopping at, they tell me; but we were in haste to finish our journey and arrive at