INSCRIPTION ON THE SECOND FRONT.
Battles gained by the Emperor.
“The battles of Montenotte, de Dego, and Millesimo, of Mondovi, the passage of the Po, the battle of Lodi, the engagement of Berguetto, the passage of the Mincio, the battles of Lonato, of Castiglione, of the Brenta, of St Georges, of Arcola, of la Favourite, of Chebreis, of Sediman, of Montabor, of Aboukir, of Marengo.
Wherever he fought he was victorious.
Through him the empire of France was enlarged by one third.
He filled the world with his glory.”
INSCRIPTION ON THE THIRD FRONT.
“He terminated the civil war; he destroyed all cabals, and caused a wise liberty to succeed to anarchy; he re-established religious worship, he restored the public credit, he enriched the public treasury, he repaired the roads and constructed new ones, he made harbours and canals, he caused the arts and sciences to prosper, he ameliorated the condition of the soldiers, the general peace was his work.”
ON THE FOURTH FRONT.
“The troops encamped in the plains of Zeyst, making part of the French and Batavian army, commanded by the General in Chief Marmont, and under his orders, by the Generals of division, Grouchy, Boudet, Vignolle, the Batavian Lieutenant, General Dumonceau, the Generals of Brigade, Soyez, &c. [here follows a long list of the names of the other officers, too tedious to enumerate; also a very long list of the different divisions of the regiments to which the above officers belonged,] have erected this monument to the glory of the emperor of the French, Napoleon the First, at the epoch of his ascending the throne, and as a token of admiration and love, generals, officers, and soldiers, have all co-operated with equal ardour: it was commenced the 24th Fructidor, 12 ann, and finished in thirty-two days.”
The whole was designed by the chief of the battalion of engineers. The total height of this stupendous monument is about 36 metres, or 110 French feet; that of the obelisk, exclusive of the socle, is about 13 metres, or 42 French feet. One end of the base of the pyramid is 48 metres, or 148 feet. From the summit of the obelisk the eye ranges over a vast extent of country, Utrecht, Amersfort, Amsterdam, Haarlem, the Hague, Dordrecht, Leyden, Gorcum, Breda, Arnheim, Nimeguen, Bois le Duc, Cleves, Zutphen, Dewenter, Swol, and a great part of the Zuyder Zee, may be distinctly seen on a fine clear day.
Upon this spot it is in contemplation immediately to erect a new city, the building of which, and the cutting of a canal to be connected with the adjoining navigation, have already commenced. Zeyst is a very handsome town, or rather an assemblage of country-houses, it abounds with agreeable plantations and pleasant woods, and is much frequented in the summer by the middling classes of wealthy merchants from Amsterdam, who sit under the trees and smoke with profound gravity, occasionally looking at those who pass, without feeling any inclination to move themselves: what an enviable state of indifference to all the bustle and broil of this world! upon which they seem to gaze as if they were sent into it to be spectators and not actors. Who, upon reflection and sober comparison, would not prefer this “even tenour” to the peril of the chace and the fever of dog-day balls!
The principal hotel here is upon a noble scale, the politest attentions are paid to strangers, and the charges are far from being extravagant. The only striking object of curiosity in the town is a very spacious building, formerly belonging to Count Zinzendorf, and now to a fraternity of ingenious and industrious Germans, amounting to eighty persons, who have formed themselves into a rational and liberal society, called the Herrenhuthers, or Moravians. This immense house, in its object, though not in its appearance, resembles our Exeter ’Change, but infinitely more the splendid depot of goods of every description, kept by a very wealthy and highly respectable Englishman of the name of Hoy at Petersburgh. Upon ringing at the principal entrance, we were received with politeness by one of the brotherhood, in the dress of a layman, who unlocked it and conducted us into ten good sized rooms, each containing every article of those trades most useful, such as watchmakers, silversmiths, saddlers, milliners, grocers, &c. Many of these articles are manufactured by the brethren who have been tutored in England, or have been imported from our country. The artificers work upon the basement story, at the back of the house, and no sound of trade is heard; on the contrary, the tranquillity of a monastery pervades the whole.
After inspecting the different shop-rooms, it will repay the trouble of the traveller to make interest to see the other part of the premises, shown only upon particular application. The refectory is a large room, kept with great cleanliness; and the meals of the fraternity, if I may judge by so much of the dinner as was placed upon the table, are very far from partaking of the simple fare of conventual austerity. A bon vivant would have risen from their table without a murmur. In this room were several music-stands, used every other evening at a concert; the vocal and instrumental music of which is supplied by certain members of the brotherhood, who I was told excelled in that elegant accomplishment. In the chapel, which was remarkably neat, there was an organ, and on the wall was a very energetic address from one of the society upon his retiring from it, handsomely framed and glazed. The dormitory upon the top of the house partook of the same spirit of cleanliness and order. Never was any sectarian association formed upon more liberal and comfortable principles. In short, it is a society of amiable, industrious, and agreeable men, who form a coalition of ingenuity and diligence for their support, and benevolently remit the surplus of their income, after defraying their own expenses, to their brethren established in the East and West Indies, and other parts of the world. They marry whenever they please; but those who taste of this blissful state are not permitted to have chambers in the house, although they may contribute their labours, and receive their quota of subsistence from it.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE MALL OF UTRECHT ... A GASCONADE ... THE RHINE ... CONQUEST OF UTRECHT ... THE CATHEDRAL ... BEAUTIFUL LINES ... ANECDOTES OF DISTINGUISHED PERSONS BORN AT UTRECHT ... THE ANCIENT INHABITANTS ... A DIRECTION ... THE CITY OF ARNHEIM ... ANECDOTE OF BECK ... DUTCHY OF BERG ... CLEVES ... ANECDOTE OF FLINK ... A TEDIOUS FORM ... ANECDOTE OF BROWN BREAD ... THE CONTRAST ... THE RECEPTION ... BONAPARTE’S HATRED OF ENGLISH.
After we had amused ourselves with roving about this agreeable place, we set off for Utrecht. I have before mentioned the manner in which the Dutch compute distances, and although I had for some time been accustomed to hear hours substituted for miles, yet as I was no longer on the canals, it sounded somewhat strange to hear a charming lady of our party observe, which she did with perfect Dutch propriety, when we were speaking of the probable time in which we should arrive at Utrecht: “Surely our horses must be poor indeed if they cannot go six hours in three.” Our road lay through a very rich and beautiful country, well drained, abounding with neat compact little farms, orchards, wood plantations, the lofty and venerable towers of Utrecht appearing full in our view all the way. We passed by the mall, which has a handsome stone entrance, is upwards of a mile in length, and is bordered with a triple row of trees, with a carriage-road on each side. When this city surrendered to the arms of Louis the Fourteenth in 1672, he was uncommonly delighted with this walk, yet, from knowing that it was equally admired by the citizens, he threatened to have every tree felled to the ground, unless they raised a very large contribution, which was immediately produced, and the mall preserved. If the menace of the conqueror was sincere, which I can scarcely believe, he united the tasteless barbarism of a Vandal to the ferocious rapacity of a tyrant. Louis overran this province, and the greatest part of Guelderland, Overyssel, and Holland, at the head of one hundred thousand men, in less than a month, a rapidity of victory almost incredible, though infinitely surpassed by the arms of France in the present times. The progress of the French king was celebrated in the following gasconade:
Una dies Lotharos, Burgundos hebdomas una,
Una domat Batavos luna, quid annus erit?
I think Utrecht one of the most beautiful cities in Holland, next to the Hague, which it is said to exceed in size. The streets are wide, and the buildings handsome, amongst which the hand of the Spanish architect is frequently to be traced. The canals are about twenty feet below the street; and the access to them for the servants of the adjoining houses is by a subterranean passage. These canals are very much neglected, and were covered in all directions with cabbage-stalks, leaves, and other vegetable substances, left to putrefy upon the surface. There I first beheld a branch of the Rhine unmingled with other waters. This mighty river has partaken of the mutability to which every thing sublunary is subjected. Near the village of Cooten, about twelve miles from Utrecht, the traveller may contemplate corn waiving and cattle depasturing where once it rolled its broad majestic waters, now diminished to a little streamlet: its division into the two great copious and navigable streams takes place a little above Nimeguen: the right branch retains the name of the Rhine; the left is called the Waal, a word expressive of a defensive boundary, which separated the ancient Batavians from their hostile neighbours on the southern border: the former, during its superabundance, produced a small branch called the Lack, which ran near the little city of Wyk, by Deurstede, directed its course towards Utrecht, upon which it bestowed the name of Ultra trajectum, passed through Woerden Leyden, and disembogued itself into the German Ocean at Catwyk: the latter branch in rolling its waters toward the sea, incorporated with the Maas, and their united streams were called the New Maas, under which name they flow by Dort, Rotterdam, and other cities, into the sea. Had rivers tongues, as poets feign they have, this much-injured branch of the Rhine might have exclaimed with Wolsey, I now am left
——to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Upon the subsiding of a great inundation, the frequent terror of the Low countries, it was found that the Rhine had changed its channels, and flowed into that of the Lack, to which it had given birth, in consequence of its channel having been amazingly deepened by the watery irruption. This branch, in consequence of the power of its waters not being able to bear down the obstructions opposed to it, is not able to force its way to the sea, and is stopped in its course near the village of Catwyk by mountains of accumulated sand, and being compelled to regurgitate, is distributed over, and lost in the neighbouring canals.
The French, under Louis the Fourteenth, retained possession of Utrecht for little more than a year, during which the magnificent monarch was so delighted with the place, that he held his court here in great gaiety and splendor; but the Dutch were heartily rejoiced to be relieved of this honour, and hailed with exultation the hour in which with his troops he retired from the country; this movement however, was preceded by the demolition of their fortifications, raising heavy contributions, and exercising many wanton acts of cruelty and oppression, which excited such disgust, that nearly all the inhabitants of the province resolved upon transporting themselves to Batavia. Although by this conquest the French had left an indelible impression of disgust behind them, and the regular forces of the town amounted to seven thousand men, and the inhabitants breathed nothing but vengeance against the Prince of Orange, this city surrendered to the arms of Prussia, who espoused his cause, in the year 1787. The rhyngrave of Salm, who had the command of the troops, covered himself with great disgrace, by this unresisting, cowardly, and, as it was generally believed, treacherous surrender of the place. In 1795, when the French troops once more approached the town, its gates were again thrown open, and they were received more as brethren than as conquerors; but the inhabitants very soon repented of this second visit, for the impositions they levied were extremely severe, and the French officers selected the best rooms in the best houses for their quarters, to the great inconvenience of families so oppressed. Upon two or three doors of very elegant mansions I saw little boards fastened, with the names and rank of the French officers who had taken up their lodgings within. The cathedral must once have been an enormous and magnificent structure, if I may judge by the doom or tower, the only part which remains perfect. The ruins present a fine specimen of the Gothic, some of the ornaments of which were in high preservation, and very beautiful. In the cloisters there is an arch, the pillars of which are apparently fastened with ropes, which upon examination prove to be done in stone, and admirably executed. The tower is of the astonishing height of 464 feet, and from the top, on a clear day, no less than fifty-one walled cities and towns may be seen; and the pyramid erected in honour of Napoleon at Zeyst presents a noble appearance in this expanded view. About midway in our ascent, we entered a vast vaulted chamber with galleries in it, in which two old women reside, who, if they require it, supply the visitors with schidam and biscuits to refresh themselves in their ascension, which are presented to them in a little room, the windows of which are scarcely visible to the beholder on the outside, commanding a very wide and agreeable prospect. Upon top of the tower there is a very numerous and fine-toned set of chimes. The ramparts are about four miles round the tower, and afford a very agreeable and picturesque walk. Utrecht was once a rich and powerful see, the bishops of which were sovereign princes, who laying the crosier aside, and assuming the sword, frequently waged bloody warfare with their rivals the prince bishops of Leyden.
The same causes which have thinned the number of students of Leyden, have reduced those of Utrecht, which do not exceed 360, most of whom are the sons of the inhabitants of the city. Two-thirds of the merchants of this place have connexions with London. There are several endowments of a charitable nature, which do honour to the city, many of which were originally instituted, and principally supported by English families resident here before the revolution. A botanic garden has lately been formed near the dome of the cathedral; it is upon a small scale, but appeared to be well arranged. In one of the gardens close to the city, was a naked little statue of Cupid, without arrows or wings, with the following beautiful inscription under it:
N’ offrant qu’un cœur à la beauté,
Nud comme la vérité,
Sans armes comme l’Innocence,
Sans aîles comme la Constance,
Tel fut l’Amour dans le siecle d’or,
On ne le trouve plus, quoiqu’ on le cherche encore.
To Beauty give your heart, your sighs,
No other offering will she prize;
As Truth should unadorn’d appear
Behold! the God is naked here.
Like Innocence, he has no arms
But those of sweet, of native charms;
No wish or power has he to fly,
Like thy pure spirit, Constancy!
Such in the golden age was Love!
But now, oh! whither does he rove! J. C.
In the gardens of Chantilly, the little god appears in the same manner, and is celebrated in the same exquisite lines.
A traveller can scarcely enter a town in Holland which has not given birth to some genius, whose fame reflects lustre upon his country. Utrecht enrols amongst those illustrious sages who resided, or were born within its walls, and who have bestowed upon it immortal celebrity, the learned Gronovius, the critic; Grævius, his pupil, one of the most profound writers of the middle of the sixteenth century, so well known for his Thesaurus Antiquitatum et Historiarum Italiæ, in thirteen folio volumes, and the two erudite Burmans. Doctor Johnson thus speaks of Peter Burman, and Gronovius, and Grævius, “One of the qualities which contributed eminently to qualify Grævius for an instructor of youth, was the sagacity by which he readily discovered the predominant faculty of each pupil, and the peculiar designation by which nature has allotted him to any species of literature and by which he was soon able to determine that Peter Burman was remarkably adapted to classical studies, and to predict the great advance he would make by industriously pursuing the direction of his genius. On the other hand, animated by the encouragement of a tutor so celebrated as Grævius, Peter Burman, by continuing the vigour of his application, fulfilled his master’s prophecy; and it has been asserted, that he passed honourably and fairly through the classes, and was admitted into the university at the age of thirteen.
“His biographer allows this to have been so stupendous a progress as to surpass the limits of all probability; of which indeed every man must be sensible, who considers that it is not uncommon for the highest genius in our country, to be entangled for ten years in those thorny paths of literature, which Burman is represented to have passed in less than two. But this prodigy has been cleared up very satisfactorily by the following observation. In the universities of foreign countries, they have professors of philology or humanity, whose employment is to instruct the younger classes in grammar, rhetoric, and languages; nor do they engage in the study of philosophy, till they have passed through a course of philological lectures and exercises, to which in some places two years are commonly allotted: whereas the English scheme of education, which, with regard to academical studies, is more rigorous, and sets literary honours at a higher price than that of any other country, exacts from the youth who are initiated in our colleges a degree of philological knowledge sufficient to qualify them for lectures on philosophy, which are read to them in Latin, and to enable them to proceed in other studies without assistance; so that it may be conjectured that Burman, at his entrance into the university of Leyden, had no such skill in languages, nor such ability of composition, as are frequently to be met with in the higher classes of an English school; nor was perhaps, at that time, more than moderately skilled in Latin, and taught the first rudiments of Greek.”
At Utrecht was also born, in 1459, pope Adrian VI. to whom the emperor Maximilian entrusted the education of his son, Charles the Fifth, and who afterwards filled the pontifical throne with piety and learning, with dignity and mildness: this distinguished personage, after having acquired his classical knowledge at the university of this city, and his philosophical at the college of Louvain, received the degree of doctor in divinity in 1491, the expense of which he was unable to sustain, and which was defrayed by Margaret, sister to Edward IV. of England. I was informed that the house he resided in, a fine Gothic building, was still standing, and that it was adorned with several curious basso-relievos, but time would not permit me to visit the venerable remains. This city had also the honour of producing the Chevalier Antonio More, who was born here in 1519, where he studied under John Schoorel, with whom, having made considerable progress, he improved himself in design at Rome, and in the true principles of colouring at Venice: one of his historical compositions, from the subject of the Resurrection, was in such high estimation as to be publicly exhibited at the fair at St. Germains, before it was purchased by the prince of Condé. More has the reputation of having imitated nature very closely and happily; his manner is strong, just, and bold, and in his portraits there is great character and life. He was much esteemed by the emperor Charles V. and was by him sent to Portugal to paint the portraits of the king, the queen, who was the sister of the emperor, and their daughter, afterwards the queen of Spain. For these portraits he received six hundred ducats, and many valuable presents; and to show their admiration of his talents, the Portuguese nobility presented him, in the name of that order, with a chain of gold valued at a thousand ducats. He was employed by most of the princes of Europe, and at every court his paintings excited universal applause. Queen Mary the First of England, presented him with a chain of gold and a pension. Upon his quitting London and settling in Spain, a singular circumstance befel him: one day as the king, who was very fond of him, and his great patron, was talking to him in a very familiar manner, he gave More in jocularity a sharp tap on the arm, which the irritable painter mistaking for indignity, instead of an act of good humour and condescension, resented by striking the king with his maulstick: a folly which had nearly in its consequence proved fatal to him, and which compelled him to quit the country with all possible celerity. His last work was the Circumcision, intended for the cathedral church at Antwerp, but which he did not live to finish.
Cornelius Poelemburg, another artist of high distinction, was born at Utrecht in 1586. He first studied under Abraham Bloemart, and afterwards, upon going to Rome, became enamoured with the works of that divine artist, Raphael, whose exquisite grace in the nude figure he endeavoured to imitate. His style was entirely new, and he surpassed all his contemporaries in the delicacy of his touch, in the sweetness of his colouring, and in the selection of fortunate objects and situations. His skies are clear, light, and transparent; and his female figures, which are generally represented naked, are equally elegant and beautiful. The Italians were highly delighted with his works, and some of the cardinals of Rome, of the finest taste, frequently attended his painting-room, to observe his extraordinary and happy manner of working. Upon his leaving Rome, the grand duke of Florence paid him great honours, and he was received with distinction in every city through which he passed. It is recorded to the honour of Rubens, that after paying him a friendly visit, and expressing the greatest pleasure from examining the works of Poelemburg, he purchased and bespoke several of his pictures, for his own cabinet; this noble conduct at once gave the stamp of currency to the works of the latter, and advanced his reputation and his fortune together. Our refined and munificent Charles the First invited him to his court, and nobly recompensed him for his labors, but he vainly endeavoured, by his princely encouragement, to prevail upon him to settle in England; the indelible love of his country prevailed over every other consideration, and he returned to his native country, where he lived in affluence and esteem, and where he continued to paint to the last day of his life, which was in the year 1660, at the great age of seventy-four.
Utrecht seems to have the fairest pretensions to have given birth to Anthony Waterloo, before slightly mentioned; an honour disputed with much ardor of rivalship by Amsterdam and other cities. The landscapes of this admirable artist are in the highest estimation, and are the closet copies of nature, without the aid of meretricious decoration. His favourite subjects were woody scenes, embellished with water, and figures and cattle added by Weenix and other artists: the variety in the verdure of his trees and grounds, the very tint of which illustrates the hour of the day and the season of the year in which they were taken, and the wonderful transparency of his water, remain unrivalled. Although the works of this great artist produced high prices, he expired in great penury in the hospital of St. Job, near Utrecht. John Glauber, called Polidore, another eminent artist, was born here in 1656: he was a disciple of the admirable Berghem, but a passion for travelling induced him to quit his master, to contemplate the sublime objects of nature in Italy. In his way he remained at Paris one year with Picart, a flower painter, and at Lyons two years with Adrian Vander Cabel, with whom he intended to have staid longer, had he not been attracted by a great number of people who were going to the jubilee, to proceed direct to Rome, where he continued for two years, indefatigably pursuing the means of improving himself in his art, and from thence he went to Venice. Upon his return to Holland he settled at Amsterdam, where he lodged with Gerard Lairesse, in whose house an academy of arts was established. These distinguished artists were united together by the same passion for their art, and the same elevation of mind, improved by their having travelled through the same countries: by this friendship the beautiful landscapes of Glauber became enriched by the graceful figures of Lairesse. Glauber ranks amongst the finest landscape painters of the Flemish school. The most frequent subjects of his pencil he derived from the neighbourhood of Rome and the Alps, and his style resembles that of Gaspar Poussin; his colouring is warm and true, his invention very luxuriant; and although his pictures are exquisitely finished, they appear as if they had been produced with perfect facility; his touch is so peculiarly just and natural, that every distinct species of trees or plants may be distinguished by the characteristic exactness of the leafing. The two brothers, John and Andrew Bott, were born in this city in the beginning of the sixteenth century; the former a landscape painter, and the latter a painter of figures: they both resided many years in Italy. John made Claude Lorraine his model, whose style he imitated with uncommon success, as did Andrew that of Bamboccio. They were much attached to each other, and painted in conjunction: their united efforts seem to be the happy result of one masterly hand. Andrew was unfortunately drowned in one of the canals of Venice whilst with his brother, in 1650, who returned to Utrecht overwhelmed with grief, which he consoled by an unabated pursuit of the art he adored. The works of John are of inestimable value, and eagerly sought after by connoisseurs.
Gallantry forbids my passing over the name of Anna Maria Schurman, born here in 1607: she was profoundly versed in languages, displayed great skill and taste in painting, as well as in every other branch of the graphic and elegant arts: she was honoured with a visit from Christina, queen of Sweden, who pronounced the most enthusiastic encomiums on her elegant attainments. This celebrated woman died at the age of seventy-one. There are other artists who do honour to this their native city, but I have mentioned those of the first order, in number and reputation perfectly sufficient to establish the pretensions of Utrecht to high rank in the roll of renowned cities. I quitted this beautiful place, the prosperity of which has suffered much by the war with England, about four o’clock on a beautiful autumnal morning, and proceeded to Arnheim, which and Nimeguen, are the capital cities of Guelderland. This beautiful and valuable province contains twenty-two considerable towns, and upwards of three hundred villages. The Menopii Gugerni, Usipetes, and Secambri, mentioned in Cæsar’s Commentaries, are supposed to have been its ancient inhabitants. Guelderland, remarkable for the salubrity of its climate and the fertility of its soil, abounds with the most romantic variety of scenery, mountain and valley, and is well stocked in every direction with fine cattle, and abounds with game. All the way to Arnheim the eye was gladdened by some of the most delightful objects descriptive of the amenity of nature. In this country I generally travelled in post-chaises, or as it is called, extra-post; but perhaps, as the following information respecting the route from Amsterdam to Cologne may be serviceable to those who travel by the diligence or post-waggon, I shall insert it:
| From Amsterdam | to Utrecht by water | eight hours. |
| to Arnheim by the diligence, which sets off every day from Utrecht | one long day. | |
| to Wesel ditto every Monday and Thursday | one very long day. | |
| to Dusseldorf | one day. | |
| to Cologne | one day. |
We were serenaded all the way by nightingales, which are very numerous in every part of this province. Arnheim or Arnhem, is a very large and elegant city, partly watered by a branch of the Naas, over which are several draw-bridges, from which there are many agreeable views. The houses are in general well built, and, what is remarkable for a Dutch town, very few of them out of the perpendicular. The entrances, called St. Jan’s Poort and Sabel’s Poort, are picturesque. St. John’s church is a vast edifice of brick, with two spires, and a fine set of carillons; but with exception to its magnitude, there is little in or about it worthy of observation; the same may be said of the church of St. Nicholas. The church near Walburges Plain, the name of which I have forgotten, is a prodigious massy pile; and beheld from the surrounding scenery has a very noble effect. The market-place is capacious, and abundantly supplied with every species of provision, which are here much cheaper than in the other parts of Holland. The streets of this city are enlivened by several handsome equipages, and throughout the place there is a considerable appearance of refinement and opulence. Here the Dutch language begins to lose itself in the German, a circumstance made manifest by a friend of mine, a native of Germany, who accompanied me on my return from that country to Holland, finding considerable difficulty in understanding the lower people in Arnheim. The inns here are in general very good. This city gave birth to the celebrated David Beck in 1621, a disciple of Vandyke, from whom he imbibed that exquisite style of colouring and penciling which belong to his school. King Charles the First was so astonished at the freedom of his hand, he one day said, “I do believe, Beck, you could paint if you were riding post.” The person of this artist was remarkably handsome, and his manners perfectly well bred: these qualities, accompanied with such talents in his art, recommended him to the attention of queen Christina of Sweden, who appointed him her portrait painter and chamberlain; and under her patronage he painted most of the illustrious persons of Europe. The following singular event occurred to this artist in his tour through Germany. At an inn where he stopped for the night, he was suddenly taken violently ill, to appearance expired, and was accordingly laid out for a corpse. His valets, who were much attached to him, sat by his bed-side, deeply lamenting the loss of so good a master; and, like the Irish upon such occasion, sought consolation in the bottle, which was put about very briskly; at length one of them, who was greatly intoxicated, said to his companions, “Come, my friends, our poor dear master used to be very fond of his glass when alive, suppose, out of gratitude, we give him a bumper now he is dead.” To this jovial recommendation the rest of the servants consented. They accordingly raised his head, and the mover of the measure poured some of the wine into his mouth; this produced the immediate effect of forcing him to open his eyes, which, from the excessive drunkenness of the fellow, did not surprise him, and he continued pouring the wine down his master’s throat until the glass was emptied, which at last completely recovered him; and by this accidental circumstance he was saved from a premature interment. However, he escaped death in this violent shape only to meet it in another, for it was generally suspected that his final fate was effected by poison administered by some miscreant, hired for the purpose by queen Christina, at the Hague, in revenge for his having quitted her to visit his friends in Holland, with a determination never more to visit Sweden. The works of this master are justly held in very high estimation, and he became the favoured object of the most unbounded marks of distinction and honour.
With an exception to large churches, and handsome streets, and some pretty and well-dressed women, there is little, at least as far as I could learn, to detain a traveller in this city, so I set off for Wesel with all due expedition, impatient to move upon the bosom of the Rhine.
On the road, which was agreeably diversified, we met several milk-maids, bearing their milk home in large copper vessels, shining very bright, slung to their backs, which had a picturesque effect. About four miles from Arnheim, just after passing a bridge of boats at Sevenhal, I entered a small town, at the end of which is the first barrier of the new territories of prince Joachim, grand admiral of France and duke of Berg, a piece of history which I first learned from a new ordinance or law, in German and French, to regulate the safe delivery of letters, pasted upon one of the gates of the town. In this dutchy most of the peasants are catholics, who make a public avowal of their faith by pointing a large white cross on the outside of their houses. On the left, within a short distance of the frontier of prince Joachim’s territory, upon the summit of a mountain, are two large religious houses for monks and nuns. A little indisposition, in addition to the heat of a very sultry day, prevented me from quitting the carriage to visit the holy fraternity and sisterhood, of whom, I was informed, very few members remain, and those far advanced in life. The revolution of France, and the progress of the French arms, have at least the merit of having prevented the immolation of many a lovely young creature, possessed of every personal and mental charm to gladden this chequered life of ours.
Thrice blessed they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage:
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d,
Than that, which withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I. Scene 1.
The approach to these convents from the town is by a pleasant avenue of trees, their situation must be very agreeable, from the extensive prospect which they command. On our right the spires of the city of Cleves, on the French side of the Rhine appeared, and produced a very pleasing effect. Upon turning the base of the hill on which the monastic mansions stand, we entered upon a deep sandy road, and a very flat and uninteresting country, in which very few objects occurred to afford any gratification to the eye. The Rhine occasionally appeared, but not to much advantage: the majesty of its breadth is obscured by the great number of islands upon it in this stage of its descent. Flink, whom I have mentioned in describing the Stadt-house at Amsterdam, was born at Cleves in 1616. This able artist was destined, like our celebrated Garrick, for the bureau of a compting-house; but his genius and passion for painting overcame all the impediments placed in their way by paternal authority, and the persuasions of friends, and he renounced the prospect of accumulating immense riches by commerce, for the glory of the art. He made great progress under Rembrandt, whose style he imitated to perfection; he soon rose to distinguished reputation, and was employed to paint the portraits of princes and illustrious personages of the times in which he flourished; he died very young and much regretted.
After a tedious and unpleasant journey I reached Wesel, a large, gloomy, and very strongly fortified town: as the gates had been closed at eight o’clock, and it struck eleven as I passed the last draw-bridge, it was with some difficulty and delay that I was admitted. Only persons travelling extra-post and in the post-waggon, or diligence, are admitted after the gates are once shut. This place presents a disgusting contrast to the neatness and cleanliness of the towns in Holland. The moment I passed the gates, a most offensive mauvais odeur assailed my nose on all sides. There is only one tolerable inn in the whole place, and that is generally very crowded. If the traveller cannot be accommodated there, he will be marched, as I was, to a pig-stye, or a house of ease to the former, where he may meditate at leisure on the sapient poetical advice of Shakspeare:
Cease to lament for what thou canst not help.
Here, according to a regulation which prevails in every part of Germany, I was annoyed by being presented with a printed paper, containing several columns, titled as follow:
| Nahme | Your name. |
| Karakter | Profession. |
| Wohnort | Residence. |
| Kommendvon | Where came you from. |
| Gehendnach | Where going to. |
| Auffenthalt | How long you intend to stay. |
All of which I duly answered in writing, except the last interrogatory but one, namely, “where are you going?” under which I peevishly wrote, “to sleep,” consolidated into one word, in large close letters. To an Englishman unaccustomed to such examinations, which after all are little more than formal, although every innkeeper by law is obliged to make such report of every traveller on his arrival, they are very liable to excite an inverted blessing upon the heads of those who trouble him in this manner.
Wesel is an abominable dunghill, very strongly fortified. In the course of my perambulations through the town, the objects which I met with were infinitely more offensive to the sense of smelling than gratifying to that of seeing, and doubly disgusting from the contrast of exquisite cleanliness which the country I had just quitted, exhibited. This part of Westphalia is very flat, barren, sandy, and dreary, presenting little more than thin patches of buckwheat. The roads are very heavy, and with an exception to an oratory in a little grove, and three wooden effigies as large as life, representing the crucifixion, not one enlivening or interesting object presented itself. I mention the following travelling anecdote by way of caution to my reader, should he select this route. At Dinslaken, one of the post towns between Wesel and Dusseldorf, the post-master told me that two horses would not be sufficient in such roads for the carriage, and declared his determination, that unless I took three, I should have none. If I had submitted to this imposition here, I must have done so throughout; I was therefore obliged to compound with this extortioner in office, by paying half of a third horse, which sum went into his pocket, and pursued my route with a couple, who conducted me in very good style to the next post town. In every part of Germany the postmasters are appointed by, and are under the control of the reigning prince of Turn and Saxis, the hereditary director and post-master general of the roads in that part of Europe. My driver stopped to give his horses some wretched hard bread, used by the peasantry in Westphalia, composed of straw and oats, called bonpournikel from the following circumstance. Many years since a Frenchman, travelling in this country, called for bread for himself, and upon this sort being presented, he exclaimed, C’est bon pour Nikel (the name of his horse); upon which the old woman who had brought it in ran about the village in a great pet relating the story.
As I was proceeding by moon-light, a German gentleman who had travelled some way with me was observing, that throughout Westphalia a robbery upon the highway had not been known for many years, and that a traveller was as safe in the night as in the day; and at the moment when he had just finished an animated eulogium upon the invincible honesty of the people, I happened to observe the shadow of a man behind the cabriolet, the head of which was raised, apparently very busy in endeavouring to cut off our trunks, which, upon our jumping out, proved to be the case; the fellow was much alarmed by our appearance, fell upon his knees, and declared that he belonged to Dusseldorf, and poverty had prompted him to quit that city, and try his fortune on the highway. Nothing could exceed the indignation of the German the moment he knew that our prisoner was a Westphalian; had he fortunately announced himself as a native of any other country, I believe he would have rather relieved the fellow’s distress, than pierced his ears, and perhaps his heart, with the bitter reproaches he heaped upon him: however, as the affair furnished me with a hearty laugh, I prevailed upon my companion to forgive the poor wretch, whose face and clothes indicated extreme wretchedness, and permit him to depart in peace; and we proceeded without further interruption to within a short stage of Dusseldorf, where we slept.
The appearance of Dusseldorf at a little distance is very handsome, particularly from the Grand ducal road, as it was styled. Upon my driving up to the principal inn, the maitre d’hotel with great pomp came out, and informed me in bad French that his house was then nearly full; that the grand Dutchess from Paris was expected every day; that his bed-rooms would be wanted for those belonging to the court who could not be accommodated at the palace, and, finally, that he could not receive me. As I immediately guessed his object, I told him that I intended to stay some days at Dusseldorf. “Oh, very well,” said he, archly adding, “you are an Englishman I perceive.” “No, sir, an American.” “Oh,” replied he, “never mind, it is the same thing: walk in, sir, and we will see what we can do for you.” This inn, the only eminent one in town, is spacious and handsome, and the table d’hote excellently supplied with a great variety of dishes, both at dinner and supper, perfectly well dressed. During my stay I was known by no other name than that of Monsieur Anglois, an appellation not very gratifying to me, upon reflecting that I was a sojourner in the territory of a brother-in-law of Napoleon, who, knowing that he is no favourite with the English, dislikes England and every thing that can remind him of it, to such a degree, that an English gentleman and lady, whom I knew, who had been detained prisoners of war in France, but were afterwards liberated, upon their route from Verdun to Holland to embark for their country, were one day overtaken by a gen-d’arme dispatched express from the last post town, to order them to turn out of the high road on which they were travelling, and to take another route which he pointed out, by which they were compelled to make a deviation of seventy miles. In consequence of the French Emperor being expected to pass that road in the course of the day, this messenger had been despatched to overtake and order them out of the way as fast as possible.
CHAPTER XX.
DUSSELDORF DESCRIBED ... ITS INHABITANTS ... THE GRAND DUCAL COURT ... ANECDOTE OF MURAT ... A DOUBLE ENTENDRE ... THE FLYING BRIDGE ... COLOGNE ... A CONTRABAND PEEP ... THE CATHEDRAL ... A COLLECTION OF GODS ... A BON MOT ... PRIESTLY MUMMERY ... ANECDOTE OF AN ARCHBISHOP OF COLOGNE ... ANECDOTE OF REUBENS AND OTHER DISTINGUISHED PERSONS ... PRESENT STATE OF COLOGNE.
Dusseldorf, so called from the little river Dussel that waters its southern side, and Dhorpf which means village, is now the capital of the imperial dutchy of Berg, under the new dynasty of the Bonaparte family: it formerly belonged to the German empire, and afterwards to the elector Palatine, who at one period made it his residence; this city owed the prosperity which it long enjoyed, to the sagacity and liberality of the elector Joseph William, who enlarged it in 1709, by nobly offering its freedom, and an exemption from all taxes for thirty years, to every one who would build a house within its walls, and took every judicious advantage of its local adaptation to trade, and established universal toleration in religion; the benefit of measures so worthy of the Christian and the ruler was speedily felt, and Dusseldorf, from a petty village, soon became a flourishing city, and contained a population of 18,000 inhabitants.
Few towns have suffered more from the calamities of war than this: its streets, squares, and houses, denote its former consequence; it now resembles a mausoleum half in ruins. Early in the year 1795, the army of the Sambre and the Meuse suddenly crossed the Rhine, and summoned the city to surrender, which it refused to do; in consequence of which the French bombarded it, and set fire to one of its most beautiful churches, which was burnt to the ground; and the city palace, which contained many noble apartments, very nearly experienced the same fate; naked walls blackened with smoke, are all that remain of this splendid pile, except that part of it which contained the celebrated gallery of paintings, which were removed to Munich under a Prussian escort. The French at length took the city by assault, the Austrians who were garrisoned within it having previously retired. I was surprised to find that the French had spared the statue erected as a mark of public gratitude, in the centre of the court of the gallery, to the honour of the elector John William, who was its founder. He commenced it in the year 1710; but dying in 1716, the completion of this princely and public-spirited design was totally neglected by his successor Charles Phillip, who employed part of his treasure, and the whole of his taste, in improving the city of Manheim. Charles Theodore, his successor, finished this institution, established an academy of drawing and painting in Dusseldorf, and also erected a public gallery of paintings at Manheim, which were open to every one, and every artist had permission to study and copy them.
The ruins of the palace have a melancholy appearance from the water, on which I made a sketch of the city, when I saw for the first time one of the Rhenish flying bridges, the description of which I shall reserve for a few pages following, as I did not go on board of it. That famous gallery, which attracted men of taste from distant parts of Europe, occupied that part of the palace which stood close to the junction of the Rhine and the Dussel, and was divided into five very large and spacious apartments, one of which was wholly devoted to one picture of Gerard Douw, esteemed inestimable, and one of the finest he ever painted; the subject of it is uncommonly complicated, yet every figure in it is so exquisitely finished, that it will bear the closest inspection. Descriptions of paintings are seldom very interesting; but the subject of this renowned picture deserves to be recorded. It represented a quack-doctor at a fair, upon his stage covered with a Turkey carpet, set out with vials and gallipots, a shaving bason, an umbrella, and a monkey: the doctor, in the most whimsical dress, is haranguing with uncommon humour and cunning in his countenance, the motley crowd below; amongst whom, a gardener wheeling a barrow filled with vegetables, a countryman with a hare hanging over his shoulders, a woman with a child at the breast, baking little cakes for the fair; another woman listening with ardent credulity, whilst a sharper is picking her pocket, are penciled in a wonderful manner. Douw has represented himself looking out of the window of a public house, and drawing the several objects. The second chamber contained the productions of the Italian school; a third those of the Flemish: a fourth was dedicated to Vanderwerff; and the fifth to Rubens.
The only part of the city which presented any appearance of animation was the market-place, which abounded with fine vegetables, and exquisite fruit. The market-women, and the female peasants, wear a large handkerchief depending from the top of the head, which has a picturesque effect. Fruit is so abundant that for the value of 3d. I purchased a pound and a half of the most luscious grapes. In this square, part of the scaffolding used for illuminating the hotel de ville, on the grand duke making his first entry into the city, remained. About a mile from the town is a country palace of the prince, separated from a garden, in front of it, by the great road to Cologne. The palace is large, and very elegantly furnished; the gardens are spacious, well kept, and open to well-dressed persons. The view of the city from these walks is very beautiful. The ramparts, which are levelling as fast as the pickaxe and spade can lay them low, in many places present a very agreeable walk.
All religions are tolerated, but that most followed is Roman Catholic, for the celebration of which there are three large churches; before one of them, raised and railed off, is a group as large as life, in wood, painted white, representing our Saviour crucified between the two thieves, and Mary Magdalen, kneeling; several persons were praying very devoutly before those images. The dead are wisely buried out of the city. In one of the streets at the extremity of the town, is a prodigious pile of buildings for barracks. The soldiers of the grand duke, principally Germans, and a few French, had a very military appearance. The manufactures are at a pause; the population is reduced to about eight thousand persons, the greater portion of whom are in very abject circumstances. How different must this place be to its former period of prosperity, before the last war, when a gay old Prussian officer who resided there, told me, that it was enlivened with clubs, casinos, and balls, when every family of common respectability could regale its friends with the choicest Johannis-Berg Hockein-Rheideshein wine. The princes of Germany differ very much from those of our own country, in the plain and unostentatious manner in which they move about. One morning, when I was crossing the court of my inn to go to breakfast, I saw a little boy fencing with a stick with one of the ostlers: as I was pleased with his appearance, I asked him if he was the son of the maitre d’hotel, to which he replied, “No sir, I am the hereditary prince Von Salm.” The prince and princess, his father and aunt, were at the same hotel, having come to Dusseldorf to pay their respects to Prince Murat. The grand ducal court was, as I was informed, kept up with considerable splendor, in the circle of which the grand dutchess, one of the sisters of Napoleon, had not yet made her appearance. It was generally believed, notwithstanding the use my worthy host made of her approaching entry, that no great attachment existed between the grand ducal pair; and that the gaiety of the imperial court of Paris possessed more prevailing attractions to the grand Dutchess than her own. Murat, grand Duke of Berg, is an instance of the astonishing results of great ability and good fortune. His origin was so very obscure, that very little of it is known. The following anecdote will, however, throw some light upon the extreme humility of his early condition in life. After his elevation to the rank of a prince of the French empire, he halted, in the close of the last war, at a small town in Germany, where he stayed for two or three days; and on finding the bread prepared for his table of an inferior kind, he despatched one of his suite to order the best baker in the town to attend him, to receive from him his directions respecting this precious article of life. A baker who had been long established in the place was selected for this purpose; and upon the aide-de-camp ordering him to wait upon the prince immediately, he observed, to the no little surprise of the officer—“It is useless my going, the prince will never employ me.” Upon being pressed to state his reasons, he declined assigning any; but as the order of the messenger was peremptory, he followed him, and was immediately admitted to Murat, with whom he stayed about ten minutes, and then retired. As he quitted the house in which the prince lodged, he observed to the aide-de-camp, “I told you the prince would not employ me—he has dismissed me with this,” displaying a purse of ducats. Upon being again pressed to explain the reason of this singular conduct, he replied, “The Prince Murat, when a boy, was apprenticed to a biscuit baker in the south of France, at the time I was a journeyman to him, and I have often threshed him for being idle; the moment he saw me just now, he instantly remembered me, and without entering into the subject of our ancient acquaintance, or of that which led me to his presence, he hastily took his purse of ducats from the drawer of the table where he sat, gave it to me, and ordered me to retire.”
The heroic courage which Murat displayed in the campaign of 1797, when in conjunction with Duphoz, at the head of their respective divisions, they plunged into the deep and impetuous stream of Tagliamento, gained the opposite banks, and drove the Austrians, headed by their able and amiable general, the Archduke Charles, as far as the confines of Carnithia and Carniola; and the numerous battles in which he distinguished himself in Egypt, and afterwards at Montebello and Marengo, where at the head of his cavalry, he successfully supported the brilliant and eventful movement of Dessaix, will rank him in the page of history amongst the most illustrious of those consummate generals, which the fermentation of the French revolution has elevated from the depths of obscurity. In Egypt he was high in the confidence of Napoleon, whom he accompanied with Lasnes, Andreossi, Bessieres, and several members of the Egyptian Institute, when Bonaparte effected his memorable passage from his army to Frejus, in August 1799. Upon the death of General Le Clerc, who was united to a sister of Napoleon, Murat paid his addresses to, and espoused his widow,[[3]] with the entire approbation of his great comrade in arms, by whom he was, upon his elevation to the imperial throne, created a prince of the empire, and at length raised to the rank of a sovereign. He is reserved and unostentatious, and is seldom visible to his people. Some of the Westphalians, who are attached to the ancient order of things, have a joke amongst themselves at the expense of their new prince, whose christian name being Joachim, they pronounce it with an accompanying laugh, Jachim, which means “drive him away;” and there is very little difference in the pronunciation.
[3]. This is a mistake of the author. Prince Murat married Napoleon’s youngest sister, who had not been previously married. Le Clerc’s widow is married to Prince Borghese.
Amer. Editor.
As Dusseldorf had infinitely less charms for me than it had for the grand Dutchess, I was as well pleased to quit it, as she was disinclined to enter it; so mounting my cabriolet, for which I was obliged to make the best bargain I could with the post-master, I set off for Cologne, the road to which is far more pleasant than any other part of the dutchy which I saw, though the whole is very flat. About six miles from Dusseldorf, I passed a beautiful country palace of the grand Duke, called Benrad, composed of a range of semicircular buildings detached from each other, standing upon the summit of a gentle slope, at the bottom of which is a large circular piece of water. The grand Duke makes this place his principal residence, and very seldom goes to that in the neighbourhood of the city more than twice in the week, to give audience and transact affairs of state, which, as the government is entirely despotic, are managed with ease and despatch. The appearance of the body-guard at the entrance announced that the prince was at this place when I passed it: the grounds and gardens, seen from the road, appear to be tastefully arranged. Although the road is sandy, yet it is infinitely preferable, I was informed, to crossing the ferry at Dusseldorf, and proceeding by that route to Cologne. After passing Muhlheim, a very neat town, the suburbs of which are adorned with some handsome country-houses, I entered, about a mile further, the village of Deutz, and beheld the venerable city of Cologne, separated by the Rhine, immediately before me. At one end of the village is a large convent of Carmelites, and on the day of my arrival a religious fête was celebrating, at which nearly all the population of the place and neighbourhood assisted, and the streets were enlivened with little booths, in which crosses and ornaments of gold lace and beads were tastefully exposed to the eye.
The bell of the flying bridge summoned me on board, and in about five minutes I found myself in the French empire, attended by French custom-house officers in green costume, who conducted me to the Douane. This ferry cannot fail to impress the mind and excite the curiosity of a stranger: it is formed of a broad platform resting upon two large barges, like our coal lighters; from this platform a vast wooden frame in the shape of a gallows is erected, which is fastened to the former by strong chains of iron, whilst from the centre cross piece, a chain of the same metal of great length, is fixed to the top of an upright pole standing in each of a long line of boats, the remotest of which is at anchor; by this machinery a powerful pressure is obtained; to each of the barges a rudder is affixed, which, upon being placed in an oblique direction, produces a lateral motion upon the stream, which acts as a force from above; so that by changing the rudder to the right or left, the bridge is forced on one side or the other of the river, with equal certainty and celerity. Fifteen hundred persons can with perfect ease be transported at the same time upon these bridges, and carriages and horses are driven upon them without any stoppage, from the banks, to which they are lashed, until put in motion. The Germans call this machine the Fliegende Schiffs-Brücke, or the volant bridge of boats; the Dutch geer burg, or the bridge in shackles, in allusion to its chains; and the French le pont volant, or the flying bridge.
The search made by the custom-house officers amongst my fellow-passengers, most of whom had only just crossed and recrossed the river, was very rigorous; the females were marched up to a small house, where, as I discovered by accidentally opening the door, and offending as the elders did when they took a lawless peep at Susanna, to the no small delight of those who were lounging without, and of embarrassment to those within, they underwent a private examination by two matrons, appointed for the purpose.
At this place I expected some difficulty; but upon my declaring myself an American, and showing my pass, and just opening my trunk, the officers, with great politeness, called a porter to carry my luggage into the city, and pulling off their hats, recommended me to La Cour Imperiale, one of the best hotels, where I arrived just in time to sit down to a splendid table d’hôte, at which several beautiful and well-dressed ladies, German noblemen, and French officers, were present.
This city was formerly celebrated for the number of its devotees and prostitutes, which the French police has very much reduced. The first object I visited, was the cathedral, which, from the water appears like a stupendous fragment, that had withstood the shock of war, or some convulsion of nature, by which the rest of the pile had been prostrated; but upon inquiry, I found that it owed its mutilated appearance to no such event, but to the obstacles which have occurred for ages in completing it, according to its original design. In the year 1248, Conrad, the elector and bishop of Hocksteden, in the pride and exultation of holy enthusiasm, resolved to erect a temple to God, which should have no equal in size and magnificence; it was intended that the two western towers should have been five hundred feet in elevation, and the nave or body of the church in proportion, and every external stone which the eye could perceive, decorated with the most exquisite ornament of pure gothic architecture. The successors of the prince bishop, who resembled in the splendor of his spirit the emperor who so elegantly wished to leave the town stone, which he had found brick, continued the building for two centuries and a half; but owing to their resources being insufficient, they were obliged to leave it in a very imperfect state, but capable of being used for religious purposes. There is no building of the kind to compare with it, but the Duomo at Milan. One of the western towers, which I ascended, is about two hundred and fifty feet high, from which there is a fine view of the city, the Rhine, and the surrounding country; the other tower is not above forty feet high. The roof of the greater part of the body of the church is temporary and low; but so spacious is the area which it covers, that one hundred massy pillars, arranged in four rows, present a light and airy appearance upon it. My guide, who was a good humoured intelligent man, with many significant shrugs of regret, informed me, that the moveable decorations of the church and altar were once worthy of a stranger’s attention; but that the generals of the French armies, during the revolution, had pillaged this holy sanctuary of its richest ornaments; however, the grand altar in the choir was not sufficiently portable for their rapacious hands, and remains to show the magnificent scale upon which every part of the cathedral was originally designed. This altar is formed of one solid block, of the finest sable marble, sixteen feet long and eight broad, placed upon the summit of a flight of steps.
The treasury, or as it is called the golden chamber, contains the robes of the priests, which are very magnificent, arranged with great care and order in several ward-robes; and busts of saints and holy utensils in gold and silver, many of which were once encrusted with the most precious stones, but which had been removed by the French, and their places supplied by paste. Amongst the still costly contents of this chamber, I noticed a small tomb of a priest in solid gold and silver, and a skull of St. Peter, of the same precious metal. In this room were several ladies, who appeared to be under the strongest influence of Roman Catholic enthusiasm; not a robe or a relic was exhibited, which did not draw forth some fervidly pious exclamation.
I was shewn, as a marvelous curiosity, the mausoleum of the Three Kings, behind the grand altar towards the east, where the bodies of these personages, and those of the martyrs, Gregory of Spoleto, and Felix Nabor, repose. The bones of the three kings are said to have been brought away by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, when he sacked Milan, and presented to the archbishop Bernauld of Dassalde, who attended him in his military exploits, and who deposited them near Bonn, from whence they were transferred to the spot where their mausoleum was afterwards erected, before the building of the present cathedral in the year 1170: the bones of these personages, of course, performed all sorts of prodigies; the blind by touching them, became astronomers, and the lame, dancing masters. This tomb, before the last war, was uncommonly rich and magnificent; but the French, who have displayed no great respect for living kings, could not be expected to pay much to three dead ones, and accordingly they have stripped their shrine of most of the jewelry, and precious ornaments. The sacrilege committed upon three holy kings, who were transported so far from their native country, reminds me of an anecdote, in which the playful wit of Mr. Hastings, formerly governor-general of India, was eminently displayed. An antiquary having collected in India a considerable number of Hindoo gods, had them well packed up for the purpose of being sent to England, and on the top of the case wrote in large characters “Gods—please to keep these uppermost;” the governor-general calling one morning on the collector, observed the package in his library, and remarking the superscription, said, “your direction is a wise one, for when you transport gods into a foreign country, it is ten to one but that they are overturned.”
Every street reminds the stranger of the former prevalence of the priesthood. Before the war, the clergy in this city, were divided into eleven chapters, nineteen parishes, nineteen convents for men, and thirty-nine convents for women, besides forty-nine chapels, institutions which supported between two and three thousand persons in useless voluptuousness and sloth.
As the other churches have been stripped of their finery, and were not embellished by any striking work of the statuary, I merely took a cursory view of their exterior: the principal are the Jesuits’ church, the collegiate church of St. Gerion, that of the Maccabees, and the abbey church of St. Pantaleon: all these and a number of other sacred buildings useless to name, abounded with saints and shrines incrusted with a profusion of jewellery, and all the mummery and mockery of cunning and credulity. With respect to the chapel of St. Ursula, a whimsical circumstance occurred some years since: in this depositary, for a great length of time, have reposed the bones of the immaculate St. Ursula, and eleven thousand virgins her companions, who came from England in a little boat in the year 640, to convert the Huns who had taken possession of this city, who instead of being moved by their sweet eloquence and cherub-like looks, put an end to their argument by putting them all to death. Some doubts arose many years since whether any country could have spared so many virgins, and a surgeon, somewhat of a wag, upon examining the consecrated bones, declared that most of them were the bones of full grown female mastiffs, for which discovery he was expelled the city. The convents and monasteries are converted into garrisons for the French troops quartered in the city. It is in contemplation to pull down about two-thirds of the churches.
On account of its numerous religious houses Cologne was called the Holy city. Bigotry, beggary, and ignorance disfigured the place in spite of its once flourishing trade and university. When the French seized upon this city, in 1794, they soon removed the rubbish of ages; three-fourths of the priests had the choice of retiring or entering the army, and when withdrawn, the weak minds over which they had exercised sovereign influence recovered their tone, and lived to hail the hour of their delivery from fanatical bondage, and the sturdy beggars were formed into conscripts. One of the most illustrious of the archbishops of Cologne was Theodoric, who was much celebrated in his time for his talents, erudition and morals. An anecdote is related of him, that upon the emperor Sigismund one day asking him how to obtain happiness hereafter, as the possession of it seemed impossible, Theodoric replied, “You must act virtuously, that is, you should always pursue that plan of conduct which you promise to do whilst you are labouring under a fit of the gravel, gout, or stone.”
When the Devil was sick
The Devil a Monk would be;
When the Devil was well
The Devil a Monk was he.
This city is celebrated for having given birth to Agrippina the mother of Nero, but it has derived more lustre from the immortal Rubens having been born here in 1640: the house in which he resided is still preserved and exhibited with great pride to strangers. This illustrious man was no less a scholar than a painter, and hence his allegorical works are more purely classical than those of any other master: of this the gallery of the Luxembourg and the banqueting-room at Whitehall bear ample testimony. Whilst he painted he used to recite the poems of Homer and Virgil, which he knew by heart, by which he infused the divine spirit of poetry into the productions of his pencil. After having studied a few years in Italy, his renown as an artist spread through Europe, whilst his learning, amenity of manners, elegant accomplishments, and amiable mind, secured to him the esteem and regard of all whom he approached. He was particularly cherished by the kings of England, Spain, and other monarchs: he was even employed upon a very delicate occasion to communicate proposals from the cabinet of Spain to that of London, and Charles I. was so delighted with his various talents, that he conferred upon him the honour of knighthood. The number of his paintings is prodigious. Sir Joshua Reynolds said that the most grand, as well as the most perfect piece of composition in the world, was that of Rubens’s picture of the Fall of the Damned, formerly in the gallery of Dusseldorf; that it combined such a varied, heterogeneous and horrible subject, in such a wonderful manner, that he scarcely knew which most to admire, the invention or the composition of the master. The last of Rubens’s paintings was the Crucifixion of St. Peter, with his head downward, which he presented to St. Peter’s church in this city one day after taking a copy of the register of his birth from its archives: the tasteless and mercenary heads of the church received this invaluable present with little expressions of gratitude, and were disappointed that the donor had not given them money in lieu: when Rubens heard of their dissatisfaction, he offered them 28,000 crowns for the picture, which, merely in consequence of the offer, they considered to be worth infinitely more, and therefore refused to sell him the work of his own hands, and it was preserved with great veneration in the church, where it continued till Cologne became one of the cities of the French empire. Rubens, to the powers and graces before ascribed to him, united the virtue of a christian: from motives of piety and benevolence he adorned many churches and convents with his matchless productions; which, as if the hallowed purpose to which they were devoted had inspired him, whilst he painted, were generally the most masterly efforts of his pencil.
Thomas à Kempis, so celebrated for his extraordinary piety, was born in the neighbourhood of this city in 1380. The last edition of his works is that of Cologne 1660, 3 vols. folio; his most celebrated work was entitled ‘De Imitatione Christi;’ which, on account of its great piety and merit, has been translated into almost every living language. This work has been attempted to be ascribed to an abbot of the name of Gerson, of the order of St. Benedict, which for many years produced severe controversies between the canons of St. Augustine, to which Thomas à Kempis belonged, and the Benedictines.
The celebrated William Caxton opened his printing office here in 1471, and printed the work of Le Fevre, which was three years afterwards published in London, where he had the honour of being the first to introduce the invaluable art of printing. Adam Schule the mathematician, who died at Pekin, was a calendar here. Vondel the Dutch Virgil was born here, as was the wonderful Maria Schurman, who was well versed in twelve languages, and wrote five classically, besides excelling in every accomplishment then known. Excess of genius and learning made her melancholy mad, and she died from an inordinate debauch in eating spiders.
The Town House is a very ancient edifice, and contains the only specimen of Grecian architecture in the city. There were three ecclesiastical electorates in Germany, viz. Cologne, Mayence, and Treves, which have been abolished by Napoleon. The revenues of the elector of Cologne amounted to upwards of two hundred thousand pounds. Cologne must have been declining for some centuries, for in the year 1200 it was capable of furnishing thirty thousand men for the field, a number which its present population is said not to exceed. The whole of the trade of this town was extensive before the last war, and at one period, in spite of its bigotted rulers, it was one of the richest and most flourishing cities in Germany: its traders carry outward annually large quantities of salted provisions from Westphalia, iron from the forges of Nassau, wood from the Upper Rhine and the Neckar, wine, hemp, tobacco, brass, tufo stone, tobacco-pipe clay, millet, gins, dried fruits, potash, copper, ribbands, stockings, and lace: and they purchase of the Dutch paper, oil, cottons, groceries, spices, medicinal drugs, also for dyeing, and English lead and tin.
The policy of the French government since it has assumed a settled form, has very much directed its attention to the depressed state of the manufactures of Cologne, which formerly employed eleven thousand children, and under its auspices there are several fabrics in a very flourishing condition, particularly those for manufacturing stuffs and ribbands, and a great deal of iron is now wrought in this city. The university is at a very low ebb, in consequence of so many young men having embraced the profession of arms. This university was once very celebrated, and was the most ancient in Germany, having been founded in 1380. Pope Urban the Sixth paid it the following compliment, in allusion to its having given birth to the college of Louvain:
Matre pulchra filia pulchrior.
This maternal university was divided into theology, law, medicine, and philosophy; but has not the only celebrity of having sent into the world many enlightened men.
In the department of Cologne the vineyards began first to appear. The vines in the garden grounds of the city are said to have yielded seven hundred and fourteen thousand gallons of wine. The wines are not attempted to be cultivated higher north.
During my stay at Cologne I visited the French parades every morning and evening. As the parades in France used to be confined to the morning, it was natural to conjecture that some new and great political storm was collecting, for which the French emperor was preparing by redoubled activity and energy. At these parades the conscripts, after having undergone a brief drilling, were incorporated with the veteran troops: to wheel, to form close column, to load, fire, and charge with the bayonet, seemed to be all the motions which were attended to. Instead of forming the line, as with us, with exquisite nicety, but little attention was paid to it, for a more slovenly one I never witnessed; but by thus simplifying the manœuvres, and confining the attention of the soldier only to the useful part of his duty, a conscript is qualified to march to the field of battle with the rest of the troops in five days. But little attention was paid to the dress of the men, who wore uniform only in a short blue coat with white or red facings, and appeared to be left at full liberty to consult their own taste or finances in every other article, for some wore breeches, some pantaloons, some appeared with gaiters, some without, some had shoes, and others half-boots.
CHAPTER XXI.
REMARKS ON THE FRENCH ARMY ... ORIGIN OF THE CONSCRIPTION ... ROBESPIERRE ... FRENCH SOLDIERS ... POLICY OF THE GENERALS ... MILITARY VANITY ... BULLETINS ... MODE OF ATTACK ... RHENISH CONFEDERATION ... ACT OF IMPERIAL ABDICATION.
As I gazed upon these men, whose appearance was slovenly, I was lost in amazement, by reflecting that they were part of that military force which had made itself terrible to so large a portion of Europe, which in its first organization was composed of men, many of whom had never had a musket in their hands, and commanded by generals who had never witnessed a military manœuvre; many of the most shining of whom had undergone an immediate transition from the most peaceful, and even the most subordinate occupations in life, to conduct armies to the field of battle, to confront and rout some of the prime, veteran troops of nations, long renowned for their eminence and military character. Robespierre may be considered as having laid the foundation of all the military glory of France, and by the unexampled energy and prospective acuteness of his measures, to have accomplished a system by which France has achieved so many brilliant victories. No one but a tyrant, who to a sanguinary soul united profound penetration, could have accomplished what he did. He swept away in a deep and impetuous stream of blood the immediate branches of the royal family, the court, its valuable and its obnoxious appendages, and made a clear arena to act upon. In the name of Liberty he invoked those who were favourably disposed to her cause, and by terror he forced the reluctant to sustain the miseries and perils of a camp. Glory or the guillotine were eternally before the eyes of the republican commanders, who thus stimulated, never revolted at a profuse expenditure of life, nor considered any victory dearly obtained, so that it was obtained: the soldiers were all young men, amongst many of whom high ardour and a passion for heroic enterprize, characteristic of that season of life, prevailed, which soon spread with electric influence upon the more considerate, prudent, and even timid part of the body. Thus impelled, they pushed on, and soon felt their enthusiasm redouble, upon beholding the brilliant impression which they made upon troops inured to war and led by distinguished commanders, who receded before them, from a conviction that they could only hope to repel the attack by an assimilation of tactics and a lavish waste of blood, a consideration which frequently forced the followers of the old school to meditate when they ought to have acted.
It is a remark in frequent use, that the efficiency of an army may be measured by the skill of the general; but the French soldiers have expanded the observation, and have exhibited the wonderful spectacle of skilful soldiers fighting under, and frequently enlarging the views and combinations of able generals. The animal organization of Frenchmen befits them for soldiers; their supple muscular form and height seldom exceeding five feet five or six inches, admit of great activity of movement, and the support of great fatigue: their minds quick, volatile, inquisitive, and fertile in expedients, enable them to see the intentions of their commanding officers in a movement, which, to the soldiers of many other countries would only be known by results. The French commanders knew how to gratify that national cast of intellect so useful to their operations, by frequently imparting to a soldier of a company, for the purpose of wider communication, the principal movements in contemplation previous to their engaging. The vanity of a French soldier is also another most valuable quality in his composition: he takes the deepest interest in the execution of every order, because he thoroughly believes that he is acquainted with all its objects; and upon the achievement of a victory, there is scarcely a French drummer who would hesitate endeavouring to make his hearer believe, that the fortune of the day was owing to some judicious idea of his own: to this vanity the military bulletins which announce successes in all the pomp of language, or convert a disaster into a retrograde victory, are addressed; for a Frenchman, even more than an Englishman, almost always believes what he is told, and is ever the last to confess a defeat. It is a rule with the French officers to give their troops as little trouble as possible when not actually in service, and to keep them perpetually upon the alert when the campaign has commenced; by this measure their troops, contrary to a received opposite notion, are generally fresher than other troops; and as they are mostly composed of young men, are capable of marching more rapidly and longer than soldiers of mixed seasons of life. The French have another great advantage in their plan of combat, which resembles the mode of engaging at sea, practised so gloriously by the late immortal Nelson, that of beating against the centre of an enemy’s line until they penetrate it; this they have several times successfully effected, by that almost endless reinforcement which the arbitrary levies furnish, and which in a moment supply the vacancy made by the bullet and the bayonet. To prevent any ill consequences from the impetuous temerity which might attend the first attack, a considerable corps of reserve is always formed of the more experienced troops, who are able to support their comrades in the front, when too severely pressed, or of forcing them to rally, should they discover any disposition to fly. To their flying artillery, which are served by their best soldiers, wherever the ground will best admit, they are also eminently indebted for their success: yet, with all those advantages, striking and eminent as they are, and the negative assistance which she derived from the frequently imbecile conduct of the enemy, France would perhaps never have been crowned with the success which has marked her march, had not her population been enormous, and had not the stupendous idea of placing a great portion of that population, by the novelty of a conscription, at the disposal of her ruler, been developed by the mighty monster[[4]] whose name I have before mentioned. If she had had twenty thousand men on the plains of Maida, she would have been spared the disgrace of seeing 7,000 of her chosen soldiers fly before 4,795 of the British arms under the gallant Stuart.
[4]. For this sanguinary tyrant the following epitaph was well penned.
Passant, ne pleure point son sort;
Car, s’il vivait, tu serais mort.
Ye who pass by his grave, need not weep that he’s gone,
Had he liv’d, ye would now be as cold as this stone.
To comprehend the present political state of those cities on the right and left banks of the Rhine, which I visited in my way to the south of Germany, it is necessary to lay before the reader the following memorable document, and letter of abdication, by which the Germanic empire is annihilated, and Bonaparte is raised to be imperial chief of a mighty feudatory confederation, in the organization of which new sovereign dignities have been conferred, and new dominions allotted, for securing his conquests in Germany.
Ratisbon, August 2.
Whereas, his Majesty the Emperor of the French, and their Majesties the Kings of Bavaria and Wirtemberg, their Electoral Highnesses the Arch-chancellor and the Elector of Baden, his Imperial Highness the Duke of Berg, and their Highnesses the Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt, the Princes of Nassau Weilburg and Nassau Usingen, of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Siegmaringen, Salm-Salm, and Salm-Kyrburg, Isenburg, Birstein, and Lichtenstein; the Duke of Ahremberg, and the Count of Leyen; being desirous to secure, through proper stipulations, the internal and external peace of southern Germany, which, as experience for a long period and recently has shown, can derive no kind of guarantee from the existing German constitution, have appointed to be their plenipotentiaries to this effect; namely, his Majesty the Emperor of the French, Charles Maurice Talleyrand, Prince of Benevento, minister of his foreign affairs; his Majesty, the King of Bavaria, his minister plenipotentiary, A. Von Cetto; his Majesty, the King of Wirtemberg, his state-minister the Count of Wintzingerode; the Elector Arch-chancellor, his ambassador extraordinary the count of Beust; the Elector of Baden, his cabinet minister the Baron of Reitzenstein; his Imperial Highness the Duke of Berg, Baron Von Schele; the Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt, his ambassador extraordinary Baron Von Pappenheim; the Princes of Nassau, Weilburg, and Usingen, Baron Von Gagern; the Princes of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Siegmaringen, Major Von Fischer; the Prince of Isenburg-Birtsein, his privy-counsellor M. Von Gretzen; the Duke of Ahremberg, and the Count of Leyen, Mr. Durand St. André, who have agreed upon the following articles:
Art. 1. The states of the contracting princes (enumerated as in the preamble) shall be for ever separated from the Germanic body, and united by a particular confederation, under the designation of “The confederated States of the Empire.”
2. All the laws of the empire, by which they have been hitherto bound, shall be in future null and without force, with the exception of the statutes relative to debts, determined in the recess of the deputation of 1803, and in the paragraph upon the navigation to be funded upon the shipping tolls, which statutes shall remain in full vigour and execution.
3. Each of the contracting princes renounces such of his titles as refer to his connexion with the German empire; and they will, on the 1st of August, declare their entire separation from it.
4. The Elector Arch-chancellor shall take the title of Prince Primate and Most Eminent Highness, which title shall convey no prerogative derogatory to the entire sovereignty which every one of the contracting princes shall enjoy.
5. The Elector of Baden, the Duke of Berg, and the Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt, shall take the titles of grand Dukes, and enjoy the rights, honours, and prerogatives belonging to the kingly dignity. Their rank and precedence shall be in the same order as mentioned in Article I. The chief of the houses of Nassau shall take the title of Duke, and the Count of Leyen that of Prince.
6. The affairs of the confederation shall be discussed in a congress of the union (Diète), whose place of sitting shall be in Francfort, and the congress shall be divided into two colleges, the kings and the princes.
7. The members of the league must be independent of every foreign power. They cannot, in any wise, enter into any other service, but that of the states of the confederation, and its allies. Those who have been hitherto in the service of a foreign power, and choose to adhere to it, shall abdicate their principality in favour of one of their children.
8. Should any of the said princes be disposed to alienate the whole or any part of his sovereignty, he can only do it in favour of the confederates.
9. All disputes, which may arise among the members of the league, shall be settled in the assembly at Francfort.
10. In this the Prince Primate shall preside, and when it shall happen, that the two colleges have to deliberate upon any subject, he shall then preside in the college of Kings, and the Duke of Nassau in that of the Princes.
11. The time, when the congress of the league, or either of the colleges, shall have particularly to assemble, the manner of the convocation, the subjects upon which they may have to deliberate, the manner of forming their conclusions, and putting them in execution, shall be determined in a fundamental statute, which the Prince Primate shall give in proposition, within a month after the notification presented at Ratisbon. This statute shall be approved of by the confederated states; this statute shall also regulate the respective rank of the members of the college of princes.
12. The Emperor shall be proclaimed protector of the confederation. On the demise of the Primate, he shall, in such quality, as often name the successor.
13. His Majesty the King of Bavaria cedes to the King of Wirtemberg, the Lordship of Wisensteig, and renounces the rights which he might have upon Weiblingen, on account of Burgan.
14. His Majesty the King of Wirtemberg makes over to the Grand Duke of Berg, the country of Bondorff, Brenlingen, and Villingen, the part of the territory of the latter city which lies on the right bank of the Brigoetz, and the city of Tuttlingen, with the manor of the same name belonging to it, on the right bank of the Danube.
15. The grand Duke of Baden cedes to the King of Wirtemberg, the city and territory of Biebrach, with their dependencies.
16. The Duke of Nassau cedes to the grand Duke of Berg, the city of Deutz and its territory.
17. His Majesty the King of Bavaria shall unite to his states the city and territory of Nuremberg, and the Teutonic comitials of Rohr and Waldstetten.
18. His Majesty the King of Wirtemberg shall receive the Lordship of Wisensteig, the city and territory of Biebrach, with their dependencies, the cities of Waldsee and Schettingen, the comitial lands of Karpfenburg, Lancheim, and Alchausen, with the exceptions of the Lordship of Hohenfeld, and the abbey of Weiblingen.
19. The grand Duke of Baden shall receive the Lordship of Bonndorff, the cities of Vrenlingen, Villingen, and Tuttlingen, the parts of their territories which are given to him in Article 14; and along with these the comitials of Bolken and Freyburg.
20. The grand Duke of Berg shall receive the city and territory of Deutz, the city and manor of Koningswinter, and the manor of Wistich, as ceded by the Duke of Nassau.
21. The grand Duke of Darmstadt shall unite to his states the burgraviat of Freidberg, taking to himself the sovereignty only during the lifetime of the present possessor, and the whole at his death.
22. The prince Primate shall take possession of the city of Francfort on the Maine, and its territory, as his sovereign property.
23. The Prince of Hohenzollern Seigmaringen shall receive as his sovereign property the lordships of Aschberg and Hohenfels, depending on the comitial of Alchausen, the convents of Klosterwald and Haltzthal, and the sovereignty over the imperial equestrian estates that lie in his dominions, and in the territory to the north of the Danube, wherever his sovereignty extends; namely, the lordships of Gamerdingen and Hottingen.
24. The members of the confederation shall exercise all the rights of sovereignty henceforward as follow:
His Majesty the King of Bavaria, over the principality of Schwartzenberg, the county of Castell, the lordships of Speinfeld and Wissenheid, the dependencies of the principality of Hohenlohe, which are included in the margraviate of Anspach, and the territory of Rothenburg, namely, the great manors of Schillings furstand Kirchberg, the county of Sternstein, the principality of Oettingen, the possessions of the Prince of La Tour to the north of the principality of Neuberg, the county of Edelstetten, the possessions of the Prince and of the Count of Fugger, the burgraviat of Winteriedden; lastly, the lordships of Buxheim and Tannhansein, and over the entire of the highway from Memmingen to Lindau.
His Majesty the King of Wirtemberg, over the possessions of the Prince and Count of Truchess Waldberg, the counties of Baindt Egloff Guttenzell, Hechbach, Ysuy, Koenigsek Aullendorff, Ochenhausen, Roth, Schussenried, and Weissenau, the lordships of Mietingen and Sunningen, New Ravensburg, Thanheim, Warthausen, and Weingarten, with the exception of the lordship of Haguenau, the possessions of the Prince of Thurn, with the exception of those not mentioned above; the lordship of Strasburg, and the manor of Ostraiz, the lordships of Gundelfingen and Neussen, the parts of the country of Limburg Gaildorf, which his Majesty does not possess, all the unalienated possessions of the princes of Hohenlohe, and over a part of the manor formerly belonging to Mentz, Krautheim, on the left bank of the Jaxt.
The Grand Duke of Baden over the principality of Furstenberg, with the exception of the lordships of Gundelfingen and Neussen; also over Trochtelfingen, Jungenau, and part of the manor of Moeskirch, which lies on the left bank of the Danube, over the lordship of Hagenau, county of Thuengen, landgraviate of Klettgau, manors of Neidenau and Billigheim, principality of Leiningen, the possessions of Lowenstein Wertheim, upon the left bank of the Maine (with the exceptions of the country of Lowenstein), and the lordships of Hailack, Bonnberg, and Habitzheim; and lastly, over the possessions of the Princes of Salm-Reiser-scheid Krantheim, to the north of the Jaxt.
The grand Duke of Berg over the lordships of Lymburg-Styrum, Brugg, Hardenberg, Gimborn, and Neustadt, Wildenberg; the counties of Homburg, Bentheim, Steinfurt, and Horstmarn, the possessions of the Duke of Looz; the counties of Siegen, Dillenburg (the manors of Werheim and Burgach excepted) over Stadamar, the lordships Westerburgh, Schadeck, and Beilstein, and the properly so called, part of Runkel, on the right bank of the Lahn. In order to establish a communication between Cleves and the above-named possessions, the grand Duke shall have a free passage through the states of the Prince of Salm. His Highness the grand Duke of Darmstadt over the lordships of Brenberg, Haibach, the manor of Habizheim, county of Erbach, lordship of Illenstadt, a part of the county of Kodigsheim, which is possessed by the Prince of Stolberg Gedern; over the possessions of the Baron of Riedefel, that are included in, or lie contiguous to his estates, namely, the jurisdictions of Lauserbach, Stockhausen, Mort, and Truenstern, the possessions of the Princes and Counts of Solms, in Weterrau, exclusive of the manors of Hohen Solms, Braunsels, and Grietenstein; lastly, the counties of Wittgenstein, and Berleberg, and the manor of Hessen-Homburg, which is in possession of the line of that name.
His most serene Eminence the Prince Primate, over the possessions of the Princes and Counts of Lowenstein Wertheim, on the right bank of the Maine, and over the county of Rheneck.
Nassau Usingen, and Nassau Weilburg, over the manors of Diersdorf, Alteneveid Neursburgh, and the part of the county of Bassenburg, which belongs to the Prince of Wied-Runkel, over the counties of Neuweid, and Holzappel, the lordship of Schomburg, the county of Deiz and its dependencies; over that part of the village of Metzselden, which appertains to the Prince of Nassau Fulda, the manors of Werhem and Balbach, that part of the lordship of Runkel, situate on the left bank of the Lahn, over the knightdoms of Kransburg; and lastly over the manors of Solms, Braunsels, Hohen Solms, and Griesenstein.
The Prince of Hohenzollern-Siegmaringen, over Trochtelfingen, Jungenan, Strasburg, Manor Ostrach, and the part of the lordship of Moeskirch which lies on the left bank of the Danube.
Salm Kyrberg, over the lordship of Gehmen.
Isenburg-Burstein, over the possessions of the Counts of Isenburg, Budingen, Wechtersbach, and Mehrholz, without any pretensions on the part of the branch in the present possession being urged against him.
Ahremberg, over the county of Dulmen.
25. The members of the confederation shall take the sovereignty of the imperial knightdoms included within their boundaries. Such of the lands as are between the states of two of the confederates, shall be with respect to the sovereignty, partitioned as exactly as possible between them, that no misunderstanding with respect to the sovereignty may arise.
26. The rights of sovereignty consist in exercising the legislation, superior jurisdiction, administration of justice, military conscription, or recruiting, and levying taxes.
27. The present reigning Princes or Counts, shall enjoy as patrimonial or private property all the domains they at present occupy, as well as all the rights of manor and entail, that do not essentially appertain to the sovereignty; namely, the right of superior and inferior administration of justice, in common and criminal cases, tenths, patronage, and other rights, with the revenues therefrom accruing. Their domains and chattels, as far as relates to the taxes, shall be annexed to the Prince of that house under whose sovereignty they come; or if no Prince of the house be in possession of immoveable property, in that case they shall be put upon an equality with the domains of Princes of the most privileged class. These domains cannot be sold or given to any Prince out of the confederation, without being first offered to the Prince under whose sovereignty they are placed.
28. In penal cases, the now reigning Princes and Counts, and their heirs, shall preserve their present privileges of trial. They shall be tried by their peers. Their fortune shall not in any event be confiscated, but the revenues may, during the life time of the criminal, be sequestrated.
29. The confederate states shall contribute to the payment of the debts of their circle, as well for their old as their new possessions. The debts of the circle of Suabia, shall be put to the account of the Kings of Bavaria and Wirtemberg, the grand Duke of Baden, the Princes of Hohenzollern, Hechingen, and Siegmaringen, the Prince of Lichtenstein, and Prince of Leyen, in proportion to their respective possessions in Suabia.
30. The proper debts of a Prince or Count who falls under the sovereignty of another state, shall be defrayed by the said state conjointly with the new reigning Prince, in the proportion of the revenues which that state shall require, and of the part which by the present treaty is allotted to attach to the attributes of the present sovereigns.
31. The present reigning Princes or Counts may determine the place of their residence where they will. Where they reside in the dominions of a member or ally of the confederation, or in any of the possessions which they hold out of the territory of the confederation, they may draw their rents or capitals without paying any tax whatever upon them.
32. Those persons who hold places in the administration of the countries, which hereby come under the sovereignty of the confederates, and who shall not be retained by the new sovereign, shall receive a pension according to the situation they have held.
33. The numbers of military or religious orders who shall lose their incomes, or whose common property shall be secularised, shall receive during life a yearly stipend proportioned to their former income, their dignity, and their age, and which shall be secured upon the goods of the revenues of which they were in the enjoyment.
34. The confederates renounce reciprocally, for themselves and their posterity, all claims which they might have upon the possessions of other members of the confederation, the eventual right of succession alone excepted, and this only in the event of the family having died out, which now is in possession of the territories and objects to which such a right might be advanced.
35. Between the Emperor of the French and the Confederated States, federatively and individually, there shall be an alliance, by virtue of which, every continental war in which one or either parties shall be engaged, shall be common to all.
36. In the event of any foreign or neighbouring power making preparations for war, the contracting parties, in order to prevent surprise, shall, upon the requisition of the minister of one of them at the assembly of the league at Francfort, arm also. And as the contingent of the allies is subdivided into four parts, the assembly shall decide how many of those shall be called into activity. The armament, however, shall only take place upon the summons of the Emperor, to each of the contracting parties.
37. His Majesty the King of Bavaria, binds himself to fortify Augsburg and Lindau; in the first of these places to form and maintain artillery establishments, and in the second to keep a quantity of muskets and ammunition, sufficient for a reserve, as well as a baking establishment at Augsburg, sufficient to supply the armies without delay, in the event of war.
38. The contingent of each is determined as follows:
| France | 200,000 |
| Bavaria | 30,000 |
| Wirtemberg | 12,000 |
| Baden | 8,000 |
| Berg | 5,000 |
| Darmstadt | 4,000 |
| Nassau, Hohenzollern, and others | 4,000 |
39. The contracting parties will admit of the accession of other German princes and states in all cases where the union with the confederation may be found consistent with the general interest.
40. The ratification of the present treaty shall be exchanged between the contracting parties, on the 25th of July at Munich.
Done at Paris, July 12, 1806.
The resignation of the high office of Emperor of Germany, by Francis, Emperor of Austria.
Vienna, August 7.
We, Francis Second, &c.
Since the peace of Presburgh all our attention and all our care have been employed to fulfil with scrupulous fidelity all the engagements contracted by that treaty, to preserve to our subjects the happiness of peace, to consolidate every where the amicable relations happily re-established, waiting to discover whether the changes caused by the peace would permit us to perform our important duties, as chief of the Germanic empire, conformably to the capitulation of election.
The consequences, however, which ensued from some articles of the treaty of Presburgh, immediately after its publication, which still exist, and those events generally known, which have since taken place in the Germanic empire, have convinced us that it will be impossible, under these circumstances, to continue the obligations contracted by the capitulation of election; and even if in reflecting on these political relations it were possible to imagine a change of affairs, the convention of the twelfth of July, signed at Paris, and ratified by the contracting parties, relative to an entire separation of several considerable states of the empire, and their peculiar confederation, has entirely destroyed every such hope.
Being thus convinced of the impossibility of being any longer enabled to fulfil the duties of our imperial functions, we owe it to our principles and our duty, to renounce a crown which was only valuable in our eyes whilst we were able to enjoy the confidence of the electors, princes, and other states of our Germanic empire, and to perform the duties which were imposed upon us. We declare, therefore, by these presents, that we, considering as dissolved the ties which have hitherto attached us to the states of the Germanic empire; that we, considering as extinguished by the confederation of the states of the Rhine, the charge in chief of the empire; and that we, considering ourselves thus acquitted of all our duties towards the Germanic empire, do resign the imperial crown and the imperial government. We absolve, at the same time, the electors, princes, and states, and all that belong to the empire, particularly the members of the supreme tribunal, and other magistrates of the empire, from those duties by which they were united to us as the legal chief of the empire, according to the constitution.
We also absolve all our German provinces and states of the empire from their reciprocal duties toward the German empire; and we desire, in incorporating them with our Austrian states as Emperor of Austria, and in preserving them in those amicable relations subsisting with the neighbouring powers and states, that they should attain that height of prosperity and happiness which is the end of all our desires, and the object of our dearest wishes.
Done at our residence, under our imperial seal,
Vienna, the 6th of August, 1806. FRANCIS.
We, Francis Second, &c. In abdicating the imperial government of the empire, we, considering it as the last effort of our care, and as an absolute duty, do express thus publicly a desire equally reasonably and just, that the persons who have hitherto been employed in the administration of justice, and in diplomatic and other affairs, for the good of the whole empire, and for the service of the chief of the empire, should be suitably provided for:
The care which all the states of the empire took of those persons who lost their places by the affair of the indemnity in 1803, induces us to hope that the same sentiments of justice will be extended to those individuals who have hitherto been employed in the general service, who have been chosen in all parts of the Germanic empire, and many of whom have quitted other profitable places, looking forward to an honourable subsistence for life, and which should not be wanting to them on account of their fidelity, and the integrity and capacity with which they have executed their functions:
We have, therefore, taken the resolution of preserving to those of our imperial servants, who have hitherto drawn their salaries from our chamber, the same appointments, reserving to ourselves to place them in employments in the service of our hereditary states; and we hope, with so much the more confidence, that the electors, princes, and states will provide for the imperial chamber of justice of the empire, and the chancellerie of the chamber of justice, by charging themselves voluntarily with this expense, as it will be trifling in amount, and will diminish every year.
As to the chancellerie of the aulic council of the empire, the funds destined for its support will be employed to provide for the wants of those individuals who have hitherto drawn from thence their salaries; this will serve them until other measures may be taken.
Done in our capital and residence of Vienna, under our imperial seal, the 6th of August, 1806.
FRANCIS.
CHAPTER XXII.
IMPERIAL REGULATION NECESSARY TO BE KNOWN ... THE DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU DES DILIGENCES PAR EAU ... SINGULAR ADVENTURE ... A SCRAPE ... A STRATAGEM ... PASSAGE TO BONN ... A DISCOVERY ... EXCELLENT EFFECT OF BRANDY ... THE CITY OF BONN ... THE MALL ... EFFECT OF BLACK ... PRESENT STATE OF BONN ... THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS ... THE MONASTERY ... ANECDOTE OF THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE ... BEAUTIFUL SCENERY.
In consequence of having been informed the preceding evening that an imperial decree had passed, by which strangers entering the French empire were permitted to bring as much money into it as they chose, but were not suffered to take out of it more than what certain officers appointed for that purpose considered necessary for the prosecution of their journey, the surplus passing in the nature of a forfeiture to the crown, I concealed about thirty ducats, which fell within this description of overplus, in my cravat, and at five o’clock in the morning, marched from my hotel to the bureau des diligences par eau, a distance full two English miles, to be searched for this superfluity of cash, previous to my ascending the Rhine. At this house a scene took place which perhaps has not often occurred to travellers, in consequence of the temporary apprehension which it excited, the ridiculous situation in which it placed me, and the retributive chastisement which it inflicted for thus venturing upon an hostile shore. I was introduced into a room looking upon the Rhine; at the bureau sat the Director, a man who wore spectacles, with a strongly marked, expressive countenance, apparently about fifty years of age; upon my bowing to him he demanded of me, in German, who I was? I requested him to address me in French, which he did, repeating the question. I told him I was an American going to the Francfort fair, upon which he put down his spectacles, and running up to me, squeezed my hand with a violence of compression infinitely more painful than agreeable, and exclaimed in very good English, “How happy is this day to me! for I too am an American.” I was obliged to return the affectionate salutation, and also to express my delight in having, so far from our native home, met with a countryman. He then asked me from what part of America I came? “From Baltimore,” was the answer. “Happier and happier!” cried he renewing his embrace, “for I was born there too.” At this moment I wished, for the first time in my life, all the force of the amor patriæ at the devil; but there was no time to be lost in meditating upon the peril and awkwardness of my situation. To prevent, as much as possible his interrogating me further about my adopted country, I addressed with all possible fluency, as many questions as I could suggest respecting Cologne, the Rhine, the war; in short, I touched upon every subject but what had an American tendency. To my observations he bowed, to my questions he gave very brief answers, and continued expressing his delight in seeing me, a delight which was very far from being reciprocal. After ordering his servants to bring breakfast for me, which I did not decline, although I had already taken that meal at my hotel, for fear of offending him, he made many inquiries after some persons whom he named, and mentioned to be of the first consequence in Baltimore. I gave him to understand that I had left the city when quite a boy; but upon his assuring me that I must remember or have heard of the persons he had named, I gave him to understand that my recollection of them was very imperfect, but that I believed they had perished by the yellow fever; upon hearing which he expressed great affliction, observing they were the dearest friends he had in Baltimore before he quitted it, about fifteen years since. In this uncomfortable situation I sat vis-à-vis with my tormentor, who continued, during breakfast, to overload me with expressions of kindness. At last the skipper of the Rhine boat made his appearance, with the welcome information that the boat was ready, upon which the director ordered him to make up a bed for me on board if I wished it, and to show me every possible attention, adding, that I was his particular friend and countryman. I now thought the hour of my deliverance was arrived, and that an adventure which promised so adversely would terminate in the display of the civilities I have enumerated; but it was determined that my correction was not yet sufficient, for as the director looked out of the window, he exclaimed, “here comes my secretary, a very steady young man, who can attend to the office for the day,” and then turning round to me, added, “and I can now have the happiness of going half a day’s journey with you, which I am resolved to do; yes, I will show to you how dear my countrymen are to me, by going as for as Bonn with you.” Distressed and embarrassed beyond measure at this fresh proof of his provoking and perplexing regard for America and me, I tried in vain to prevail upon him not to think of carrying his politeness so far, and expressed my strong sense of the attentions with which he had already completely overwhelmed me: all that I urged appeared only to redouble the warmth of his expressions, and to confirm him in his determination.
With a heavy heart and a light countenance we walked arm and arm down to the shore, and ascended the boat, over which, as well as all the other Cologne passage boats, it appeared he had complete sovereignty by virtue of his office, and in a minute afterwards the towing horse advanced at a rate of about two English miles and an half in an hour on the French side of the river. The director made me sit next to him in the cabin, telling the passengers, who appeared to be very respectable, that I was an American and his countryman, and that that was the happiest day he had experienced for fifteen years. In the course of conversation with him, from the gasconade stories which he related of his own exploits, I was induced to entertain suspicions of his character; he told me that he was one of the most conspicuous characters in the French revolution; that General Custine owed all his glory in the field to him; that he had long resided at Berlin, where he had, by his intrigues, maintained for some time a complete ascendency in the Prussian cabinet; that he was engaged in a vast literary work, in which all the great events that had agitated the world for the last ten years, would be unfolded in a manner never before developed; that he had entered into the service of the French Emperor, solely to promote the interest of the empire. He observed, after engaging my word to keep the matter secret until I reached my own country, that the Emperor was abhorred throughout the empire, that he was a remorseless tyrant, and that he could prove him to be a coward.
To the latter part of his assertion I took care to offer no remark, but under the pretence of wishing to view the city of Cologne at a distance, the river and the country, and also to gain a little respite from such a rapid succession of untoward circumstances, I ascended the top of the cabin and refreshed myself by making the sketch engraved. The tower, the mighty mass of the unfinished cathedral, the numerous spires, the shores on either side, the rapid motion of the vessel descending the Rhine, the singing of those on board, the clear brilliancy of the sky, afforded reanimating delight to my mind.
About ten o’clock my persecutor raised his head through the cabin door, to announce that dinner was ready, and to request my company: upon descending I found some soup, and beef roasted after the German fashion, and that the director had, while I was above, been taken ill, from the occasional agitation of the boat, that to allay his sickness he had asked one of the gentlemen on board for some brandy, and of which he had evidently taken a great deal too much: the spirit rapidly operated upon his head, and a more abominable nuisance in the shape of man I never beheld: incapable of sitting at table with such a miscreant, I resumed my old place where I had not been seated long before I heard him abusing all the passengers, except myself, for whom he again expressed “the assurance of his high consideration,” and threatening to order them all to be thrown overboard, which he seemed to be perfectly able to do himself, for he was one of the most powerful men I ever beheld: upon which they relinquished the cabin to himself, and, excepting a very pretty French girl, came upon deck. Upon hearing her scream violently, I went below to see what influence his countryman could now have over the director: as I was handing her out of the cabin, he forcibly pulled me back, closed the door, and said, in a manner which was perfectly intelligible, though occasionally interrupted by the spasms of intoxication, “I know you, though you think I do not; you are no American, you are an Englishman, and a son of Mr. Erskine the orator; you are here on a secret mission, and your life is in my hands, but I will not betray you.” The reply I made was, “I am engaged in no secret mission, my soul would revolt at it, nor can I be the son of my Lord Erskine, for he is now upon the ocean, as ambassador from the court of Great Britain to my country;” to which I added, “that it was in vain for him to attempt to deceive me any longer, for I was satisfied, by his observations respecting America, that he had not been born in that country:” to which, to my no little consternation, he replied, “No, nor have I ever been there, I am a German by birth, I was educated by an Englishman who lived at my father’s, and I am now in the service of one of the greatest heroes, and the most illustrious of men.”
I know not whether my life was in peril, but it is certain my liberty was, and to preserve it, I thought that something should be immediately done; accordingly I ascended the top of the cabin, where all the passengers were assembled in a state of considerable uneasiness, from one of whom I borrowed a bottle of brandy and a coffee-cup, with which I returned to the director, and insisted upon drinking his health in some excellent spirit, and raising my hand and the bottle in a manner which, in his state, prevented him from seeing what I poured out, I affected to fill and drink it off; I then gave him a bumper, which I several times repeated in a similar manner, until the miscreant dropped under the table, where he continued in a state of utter insensibility, and with little appearance of life, until we arrived, which we did in about six hours, at Bonn, when he was taken out of the vessel by some men, conveyed to a house near the banks of the river, and, thank heaven! I saw no more of him, but proceeded with the rest of the passengers to a very neat inn a little way in the city, where we had an excellent dinner and some good white Rhine wine. The stream of the Rhine became less rapid as we approached Bonn, where its waters are shallower than in the neighbourhood of Cologne, where all large vessels ship their cargoes which are destined for any of the towns higher up, into craft constructed peculiarly for the purpose, and which draw much less water. As I determined to sleep at Bonn, I had a favourable opportunity of seeing this beautiful little city, which enabled the former Electors of Cologne to display their taste by selecting it for their residence. It was elegantly and justly observed by a French lady on board of the boat as we approached the city, Voilà Bonne! c’est une petite perle! no expression could describe it better; when I made my view of it, the dark clouds behind it set off the pearl-like appearance of the palace and buildings. I saw no spot on the Rhine in the shape of a town with which I was so much delighted; it consisted of little more than 1000 houses and 8000 inhabitants. In the neighbourhood the country begins to undulate, and the vines make a luxuriant appearance. The wine made here and in the adjacent parts is tolerably good; that which grows upon the black basalt hills, further to the southward, is infinitely preferable, black being a powerful agent to attract and retain heat; hence the rents of hills are rather high. So powerful is this colour in attracting and retaining the heat, that a very intelligent friend of mine, who resided for some time in China, informed me, that for the purpose of ripening their fruits as early as possible, the Chinese gardeners paint their garden walls black, and lately in some parts of England this plan has been followed. Everything in and about the city bears testimony to the enlightened liberality and refined taste of the last of the Electors of Cologne, who was cordially beloved and admired by all classes of his subjects. The building which was once his palace, is very extensive; it stands just without the city upon an elevation of ground, and commands a most enchanting prospect, embracing the windings of the majestic Rhine, part of the village of Poppledorff, the ci-devant monastery of Gruizberg crowning the summit of a hill, and at a distance the Seven Mountains, clothed with vineyards, and the spires of Coblentz. This beautiful building is now applied to government purposes; in the left wing towards the orange garden, which is prettily disposed, the French Emperor has preserved the Lyceum for instructing boys in Latin, Greek, German, French, mathematics, and philosophy: the professors are very able men, and the institution is in a flourishing condition: this is one amongst the many noble establishments founded by the last Elector, which in his reign was kept in another quarter of the city: this elegant pile of building, which is now stripped of all its valuable ornaments, was raised by the elector Clement Augustus in 1777, upon the same site on which no less than four preceding palaces had fallen victims to the flames: there is a beautiful walk under a quadruple row of lime trees, which leads to a small country palace: this walk forms the fashionable parade of the city, and was graced by a number of beautiful and elegantly dressed ladies. Some very pleasant French officers, with whom I was walking in this place, expressed their surprise at seeing an Englishman amongst them, and I was obliged to find refuge again in my American adoption.
Through a beautiful and romantic country, by a short walk a little beyond Gruizberg, towards the south, is the picturesque hill of Godesberg, or Godshill, so called from a sanative mineral spring flowing close to it, which contains fixed air, iron, magnesia, and salt: the last Elector who never omitted any thing which could add to the comfort and happiness of his people, erected an assembly and other rooms, and also pleasure gardens for recreation close to the spring, and by some very wise regulations, encouraged the building of lodging-houses. At this place, many of the unhappy French emigrants, after the revolution, found a little relief from the miserable recollections of their fallen fortunes and altered fate: the court of the prince bishop was remarkable for the elegance, hospitality, and refined freedom which reigned throughout it, and in return in every visitor he beheld a friend. The influence of this scene of courtly felicity upon the manners of the people had not as yet subsided. A peculiar air of refinement distinguished the deportment of the inhabitants: after an exquisite ramble, I returned through the square, a spacious irregular area, where the French troops quartered in the place were exercising, and where a very ancient Gothic town house stands, to supper at my hotel, at the table d’hote of which I again smarted for the temerity of trespassing upon this delightful spot. During our repast, which abounded with a great variety of choice and excellent dishes, and which was attended by many French officers, a German lady who sat opposite to me, always addressed and alluded to me by the perilous name of “Monsieur Anglois,” which excited some considerable attention amongst the company towards me; at last a French officer whose physiognomy did not present the most pleasing collection of features, rose up, eyed me all over, and went out: I expected nothing less than being obliged to take shelter once more under my American alliance, but after waiting in the room an hour, I saw nothing more of him, and went to bed. Whilst a cruel and savage state of hostility between man and man thus embarrassed the progress of a traveller, whose only object was to contemplate the beautiful face of nature, never did the divine object of his pursuit appear more arrayed in the smiles of peace and loveliness. The government of Bonn, as well as Cologne, and all the other cities on the left bank of the Rhine is vested in a governor appointed by Napoleon, and is purely military. Under a clear and cloudless sky I bade adieu to Bonn with great reluctance, and embarked on board of the passage-boat bound to Cassel. As we passed the lofty towers of Plittersdorff, on our right, the Rhine unfolded itself in all its glory. On our left the seven mountains (Sieben Geburge) called the Drakenfels, Wolkenbourg, Rolandsekke, Löwenburgh, Nonnenstromberg, Hoke Ochlbey, and Hemmerick, arose with uncommon grandeur, crowned with convents and the venerable ruins of castles. In distant ages, many a German baron bold resided in rude dignity with his martial followers upon the summit of these mountains, from whence they waged war against each other, and many of their remains of antiquity are the work of Valentinian in the fourth century, who overthrew the Germans, and who fell a victim to his inordinate passion, for when the Quadi sent to him to make a peace, the awkward appearance of some of the ambassadors so enraged him, that in his anger he burst an artery.
Drackensels has infinitely the advantage of situation; it rises perpendicularly from the river to a stupendous height, crowned with the roofless remains of an ancient castle, brown with antiquity; midway it is covered with luxuriant vines, whilst all above is red and gray rock. The other mountains, which recede to a great distance, appeared to be clothed with the clustering grape, on the opposite side the vineyards, sloping close to the water’s edge, extended as far as they could reach; every where the genius of this terrestrial Paradise seemed as if with tasteful finger he had
——led the vine
To wed her elm——she spoused about him twines
Her marriageable arms! and with her brings
Her dower, the adopted clusters, to adorn
Her barren leaves. Milton.
As we advanced, a beautiful island in the centre of the river, covered with poplars, walnut-trees and elms, from the bosom of which arose the roof and belfry of the monastery of Nonen Werth, or Worthy Nuns, formed the back scene: the bosom of the river was enlivened with the peasants of the neighbourhood moving in boats worked and steered with paddles, and the banks of the French territory with groups of French soldiers bathing, and singing their national songs.
As we passed the monastery the matin bells rung, and gave a romantic interest to the scene: this pious seclusion is included in the French line of sovereignty, and was condemned by Bonaparte to change its owners and its nature for ever; but at the earnest intercession of the Empress Josephine, he consented to suffer the sisterhood to enjoy it during their lives, after which it will devolve to the empire. Wherever power could effect and policy justify the measure, Bonaparte has displayed his decided hostility to monastic establishments of every description; he considers them as so many sinks of sloth, in which all the noble principles and purposes of life become stagnant. In Paris only one convent, that of the Blue Nuns, is permitted to remain. The numerous convents which adorn the French side of the Rhine with the most picturesque appearance, are either converted into fabrics, or suffered to run to dilapidation: the river, from its meanderings, is land-locked all the way, every turning of which surprised and captivated me with some new beauty. Here, behind a line of walnut, lime and beech trees, just skirting the margin of the river, a stupendous pyramidal cliff appears, with every projection upon which the cultivator could lodge a layer of vegetable mould, supporting a little growth of vine: there, mountains of vineyards, relieved by mouldering castles, and convents rising from masses of rock shooting forwards, or piercing the sky from their pointed pinnacles, arrest the attention. Sometimes a torrent brightens before the beholder, and distantly roars upon the ear; at others the naked bed of one appears, or a rude gap through which the eye penetrates into ranges of other vine-clad mountains, variegated with majestic ruins, is seen. At the base of the hills on the sides of the river numerous towers and villages constantly appear, defended by ancient walls and turrets, adorned with venerable churches, brown with age, surmounted with lofty spires, every where inviting the reflection of the moralist, the investigation of the antiquary, the song of the poet, and the pencil of the painter.
CHAPTER XXIII.
BASALT MOUNTAINS ... ANDERNACH ... ANECDOTE OF GENERAL HOCHE ... RHENISH FLOATS ... SINGULAR ACCIDENT ... FRENCH POLICE ... NEUWEID ... THE RHINE BOAT ... TOMB OF GENERAL MARCEAU ... ANECDOTE OF FRENCH HEROISM ... COBLENTZ ... ITS SURRENDER TO THE FRENCH ARMS ... ANEDOTE OF FRENCH VIVACITY ... THE ROCK AND FORTRESS OF EHRENBREITSTEIN ... THE GRIFFON ... STUPENDOUS FRENCH ROADS ... BOPPART.
Almost all the immense mass of mountains which extend from Bonn to Andernach, is composed of the basalt and slate; the former has a more artificial appearance than almost any other mineral production. In no form can it puzzle the philosopher more than at the Giant’s Causeway, in Ireland, where it assumes a columnar shape, which has every appearance of having been chisseled by the hand of a skilful mason, and of having been regular granite cooling after fusion, and formed into regular masses by crystallization. In the small cavities of these mountains the martins and swallows find refuge, and in a comfortable state of torpidity pass through the cold and cheerless weather of winter. The children of the peasantry amuse themselves in discovering their retreats, at an apparent exposure of their own lives.
In an amphitheatre of vast dusky basalt mountains, the sombre gates, towers and pinnacles of Andernach appeared: in consequence of the river making a long sweep, I landed with an intention of rejoining the boat at a village named by the skipper; a more solemn scene of gloom and grandeur, I never contemplated: the ruins of this town towards Coblentz are of great antiquity. The inhabitants insist upon it, that the remains of the Emperor Valentine are deposited in one of their churches, and that Julius Cæsar when he so victoriously fought against the Suabians, passed over the Rhine at this spot, where Drusus the general of Augustus, built one of those fifty castles which are erected on the banks of the Rhine: but the French, who narrowly investigated every part of the river which their victorious arms enabled them to visit, with great acuteness, and with the assistance of history, believe that this celebrated landing was effected a little higher up the river, a short distance from Engers, at a place called the White Tower (der Weisse Thurm), the venerable front of which I saw as I afterwards advanced on our right, in the centre of a sudden recess of the river, where it has the appearance of having served the united purposes of a castle and a watch tower; at its base is a considerable village, which formerly belonged to the Elector of Treves: this situation is from a combination of local advantages, peculiarly favorable to the completion of such a passage, and in confirmation of the opinion, a great number of Roman antiquities have been found there. General Hoche, at the head of an immense army, aided by the obscurity of the night, crossed the Rhine at this place in 1797, and astonished the imperial troops the next morning by their presence.
This was the last exploit of that general. Near this tower there are deposited his remains, over which a mausoleum has been erected. This young commander died of an enlargement of the heart at Wetzlar. His funeral was conducted with uncommon military pomp. The procession moved from the place where he died, across the Rhine to the White Tower, amidst the discharge of cannon, which were fired every quarter of an hour.
The trade of the Rhine is here very flourishing, for exclusive of the neighbouring vineyards which produce fine wines, and the basalts of the adjoining mountains used for building and paving, this city derives considerable wealth from the lapis tophaceus or tuf stone, the harder sort of which form excellent millstones; vast quantities are shipped for Holland, to construct or repair its dykes with, and the more friable is used for building, whilst its powder mixed with lime forms the hardest and most durable cement. I saw the cabins of several treckschuyts in Holland covered with it, which were perfectly impervious to the rain: the Germans also use it to floor their houses with. This stone is considered to be a species of the pumice-stone, or imperfect lava, and of volcanic production.
On the banks leading to this city, I saw part of one of those amazing floats of timber which are formed of lesser ones, conveyed to this city from the forests adjoining the Rhine, the Moselle, the Maine, &c.; these floats are attached to each other, and form a platform generally of the enormous dimensions of eight hundred feet in length, and one hundred and sixty in breadth, upon which a little village containing about eighty wooden houses is erected for the accommodation of those who are interested in, and assist in navigating this stupendous raft, frequently amounting to seven and eight hundred persons, men, women, and children; besides these buildings, there are stalls for cattle, slaughtering houses, and magazines for provisions: the float is prevented from striking against the shores, where the turnings are abrupt, by the application of thirty or forty anchors, which with the necessary cables are conveyed in fourteen or fifteen boats which precede it, and its course is safely directed by German and Dutch pilots, who are hired for the purpose.
After great rains when the current is rapid, the whole is entrusted to its propelling force, otherwise several hundred persons are employed in rowing, who move their oars at a given word of command. The whole of these wonderful moving masses is under the entire direction of a governor or superintendant, and several officers under him. Sometimes they are months in performing their voyage, in consequence of the water being low, in which case they are obliged to wait till the river is swelled by the rains. In this manner they float from the high to the low countries, and upon their arrival at the place of destination, the whole is broken up, and finds a ready market. About twelve of them annually arrive at Dort, in Holland, in the months of July and August, where these German timber-merchants having converted their floats into good Dutch ducats, return to their own country with their families, to enjoy the produce of their labour and enterprize.
The clergy and monks in Andernach used to be, to use a good humoured homely expression of a late illustrious statesman, upon an application made to him for a place under his administration “as thick as five in a bed;” beside six vicars belonging to a large parish church, there were no less than five crowded convents, and the population did not exceed four thousand souls: the convents are now converted into garrisons for French soldiers, and storehouses for tradesmen. After viewing the city, I set off on the road to Coblentz, with a view of meeting the boat at the place appointed, and after walking about two miles, I lost all traces of the river; however, observing about three parts of a mile off, the tops of a long semicircular line of poplars, I concluded the river flowed by them, and I accordingly endeavoured to penetrate to the bank through a large willow wood, in which I soon lost myself. At last, however, I succeeded in forcing a way into a little footpath, in pursuing which I suddenly came upon a Frenchman, poorly clothed in green, with a book in his hand; he courteously addressed me, remarked that I looked rather warm, and conducted me to a recess in the wood, close to the water, where there was a bed of straw and a gun: at first I regarded him as a robber, but he soon gave me to understand that he was a link in a vast chain, composed of forty thousand soldiers, placed in this sort of ambuscade at the distance of a gun shot from each other, by the orders of the government of France, to guard the left bank of the Rhine from smugglers; and that to prevent contraband practices, no boat is suffered to pass either up or down the river after sunset, without being fired upon; that they are always clothed in a sombre dress, to prevent observation, and are concealed in this manner wherever the sides of the river will admit of it. Upon my informing him that I had lost my way and my boat, he politely assured me that it had not yet ascended the river, and hailed a little punt passing by, which enabled me to regain the vessel, then very fortunately just approaching. Notwithstanding the vigilance of the French police, the rafts I have described carry on a considerable contraband trade in the Rhine wines and Seltzer water.
Opposite to the spot where this occurrence took place, at the bottom of a range of hills, is the delightful town and palace of Neuwied, built of white stone, at one end of the line of poplars which I have mentioned, and almost the only town I saw without walls or any sort of fortification on the Rhine. Nothing could exceed the air of happiness and prosperity which seemed to reign in this delectable little capital, which looked perfectly fresh and new, the prince of which receives, because he deserves, the affections of his subjects; every one on board, with great vivacity, spoke of the toleration, the liberal extension of the rights of citizenship to foreigners, and the public spirit of its ruler. The place is enriched by several flourishing iron works, steel, paper, and cotton manufactures (the latter, the first introduced into Germany), printing, watch, and ingenious cabinet-making. Before the last war, in the forges and founderies, and different fabrics, not less than four thousand persons were employed, and their circulation at a fair has been known to amount to forty or fifty thousand florins. There is an establishment of Moravian brethren here more numerous than that at Zeyst. The last and the present wars have of course considerably reduced the number of workmen, by forcing many of them into the army; but, notwithstanding, there is no town on the Rhine in a more enviable condition, for every thing which can impart content and felicity to man. It was a curious and highly interesting circumstance to see in Neuwied and Andernach, almost opposite to each other, the most modern and the most ancient city on the Rhine. The price of freight upon the Rhine is rather high: before the French united together so many petty sovereignties it was much higher, owing to the number of tolls which were paid to each; previous to that event there were no less than twelve tolls to discharge between Cologne and Amsterdam.
We had a very good table d’hote on board, at a moderate price, abundance of Rhine crabs, excellent grapes, and a variety of other fruits, which, as well as the most delicious bread I ever tasted, we purchased at the different towns where we stopped. I had the comfort of being attended by an intelligent, animated fellow, who had been in the service of the immortal Nelson on board of one of the ships which he commanded, and afterwards with the English army in Egypt, who offered his services on board the boat at a very reasonable rate. The richness, novelty, and majesty of the scenery, kept me constantly on the roof of the cabin, from the early hour of starting till the hour of nine at night, when, for the reason stated, we always stopped at some town or village till morning. In these stoppages we entirely depended upon the variable velocity of the current, not to say a word of the caprice of our skipper, or the influence which the residence of any particular favourite or friend might have upon him; the consequence of which was, that we arrived at places to sup and sleep where we were not expected, and of course our patience was put to a little, but never a considerable trial. Within three or four miles of Coblentz, on our right in ascending the river, we passed a pyramidical mausoleum, erected to the memory of the French general Marceau, who distinguished himself at the battle of Mons and Savenai, and died of the wounds which he received at the battle of Altenkirchen in 1796.
At Bendorf, a romantic village on our left, upon a branch of the river, a terrible battle was fought between the French army, commanded by Gen. Hoche, and the Austrians, after the former had effected the passage I have before mentioned, from the white tower, which, after a tremendous slaughter on both sides, terminated in the retreat of the imperial troops. In this battle an extraordinary instance of prowess and enthusiasm occurred, which is said to have decided the fate of the day; the French had frequently attacked an Austrian redoubt, the possession of which was of great consequence to them, and had as often been repulsed with great carnage; at last a French general rode up to the granadiers commanded by Captain Gros, and exclaimed, “Soldiers, swear to me that you will make yourselves masters of that redoubt.” “We swear,” replied Gros, holding up his hand, and his soldiers doing the same: they returned to the attack with redoubled fury, and the havoc became dreadful: the French troops were upon the point of again giving way, when their leader had his right arm crushed by a grape shot, upon which, with a smile of triumph, he grasped his sabre with his left, rallied his men and carried the redoubt. As we turned a considerable meander of the river by Neuendorff, one of the grandest spectacles I almost ever contemplated opened upon me: the mighty rock of Ehrenbreitstein, formerly called the Gibraltar of the Rhine, with its dismantled batteries and ruined castles, rose with awful and unexampled majesty on the south; at its base was the palace formerly belonging to the Elector of Treves, and the town bearing the name of this wonderful fortification; and immediately opposite to it, as we advanced a little farther, the beautiful city of Coblentz appeared. Here we were obliged to be separated from our horse, on account of the Moselle, which discharges itself into the Rhine at this place, the mouth of which we crossed by the assistance of our boatmen’s poles. Over this river there is a handsome stone bridge of many arches, and formerly there was a bridge of boats from this city to Ehrenbreitstein, which has been most judiciously removed, and succeeded by one of the flying bridges before described, by which a more convenient communication is kept completely open, and the navigation is not impeded. Coblentz is a very ancient city; it was the seat of the Roman emperors, and of the kings of the Franks, and a favourite residence of the archbishops and electors of Treves, who, in ancient times of broil and peril, resided in the castle which crowns the majestic rock opposite to the city. Before the revolution there were three parish churches, two colleges, a church belonging to the Jesuits, four convents of monks, dominicans, carmelites, franciscans, and capuchins, and three nunneries. At that period the population of the inhabitants, of the garrison, and the vale of Ehrenbreitstein, was calculated at 13,000 souls; at present it is not supposed to exceed nine thousand. The city has many good and some handsome buildings, and it is further recommended by its supplies of excellent mines, pit-coal, wood, and lime. Its best square is the Clemenstadt; there are several handsome hotels, of which the ancient hotel, the vast rock which formerly protected it, and the antiquity of its buildings, cast a gloomy grandeur over the whole place, which never exhibited so much gaiety as in the winter of 1791, when the French princes and their followers were nobly entertained and protected here by the Elector, before they marched to Champagne, to experience those disasters which finally confirmed the overthrow of their devoted house.
Coblentz derives its name by not a little meander of etymology, from the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle at its base. Ausonius, one of the most celebrated of the Latin poets of the fourth century, wrote five hundred verses in commemoration of this river, which, compared with the majesty of the river into which it rolls and is lost, is scarcely worthy of such an honour: the view from its banks is also in an equal degree of comparative inferiority, and by the unceasing agitation of its confluence, it has the reputation of having alarmed the tender nerves of the river-fish, of which the inhabitants of this city are not so well supplied as the neighbouring towns.
One of the most beautiful objects in this place is the new palace, built to the south of the city, close to the Rhine, by that splendid and amiable prince, the Elector Clemont Vencelas; it is of brick stuccoed, to resemble stone, has a noble Ionic portico, and including its wings, extends one hundred and eighty yards. A further description of its exterior, as I have made a drawing of it, and moreover as it is now converted into an hospital, were useless. Its grand staircase, its apartments consisting of a chapel, an audience-hall, concert-room, library, cabinet, dining-room, besides an immense number of other rooms, excited the admiration of every visitor, by their magnitude, magnificence, or elegance. Its furniture, its mantle-pieces, its tapestry, and inlaid floors, all corresponded in taste and splendor with the rest of the building; now not a vestige of its consequence or original destination remains, but what its walls display. Most of the windows are broken, stuffed with hay, or further disfigured by having linen hanging out to dry from them; the area before the grand front, which was formed into an elegant promenade, is now broken, and its graceful plantation totally destroyed. A little way further to the southward, on the opposite side, under the impending rocks of Ehrenbreitstein, is the old palace, a sombre building, which the Elector Clement quitted almost entirely on account of its gloom, and the humidity of its situation.
The Elector of Treves excited the indignation of the French against him very early in the French revolution, by encouraging the expatriated French princes to reside and hold their counterrevolutionary councils at Coblentz. In September, 1794, General Jourdan, with his accustomed energy, compelled the Austrians to retreat to Hervé, and afterwards to Aix la Chapelle, when, supported by the main body of the army, the French attacked all the enemy’s posts from Ruremonde to Juliers: at this eventful period, General Clairfayt having occupied a strong position upon the Roer, resisted the French for some time, but their ardor and numbers at length compelled the Austrians to retire into Germany, leaving behind them ten thousand of their comrades, killed or taken prisoners, in the short space of three days; and soon afterwards a detachment of the French army, under the command of General Moreau, entered Coblentz as victors, Cologne being already in their possession, and Mainz, or Mayence, the only city in the possession of the allies on the left bank of the Rhine.
I was informed by some French officers who were in the boat with me, that the society in Coblentz was very elegant; that a number of families lived in splendor; and also, that Bonaparte had continued with some modifications the colleges, and most of the public institutions, which the Electors of Treves had at various times established in that city. The vast and celebrated monastery, called in German Karthaus, or La Chartreuse, situated on a high mountain, in the neighbourhood to the west of Coblentz, from which the countries of Treves, Mayence, Cologne, Darmstadt, d’Anspach, and Wied, may be seen, is converted into an observatory, and a place of very agreeable recreation.
Upon my return, in descending the Rhine, I had an opportunity of more closely seeing Ehrenbreitstein, which I was enabled to do from the following circumstance: the Rhine schuyt was uncommonly crowded, and late in the evening we arrived at a hamlet on the right bank of the river to sleep: the house in which we were to pass the night was not able to furnish beds more than barely sufficient for the ladies on board, which at once determined a French officer, one of the party, who had not placed his head upon a pillow for three preceding nights, and who was a wretched invalid, apparently in the last stage of a decline, to hunt amongst the cottagers for a fiddler, to whose miserable sounds this epitome of his nation, with several other officers and petty German merchants, danced till the dawn of day, pour passer le temps, and the boat was ready to proceed. Having found by moon-light a nook in a peasant’s nest, in the most romantic situation under heaven, I lay down, and never awoke till an hour after the boat had departed, in which dilemma I was obliged to hire a punt with two paddles, and by the assistance of a couple of sturdy peasants overtook the passage-boat, which lay off Coblentz, during which I visited Ehrenbreitstein. At its base there is a pretty town and an excellent hotel; opposite to the palace is a walk of limes, close to which was moored the electoral state yacht, or barge, in shape and size resembling our Lord Mayor’s, but not quite so gaudy. The ascent to this stupendous rock, which is eight hundred feet in a perpendicular line above the level of the river, is by a very narrow, steep, and winding path: the noble fortification on its sides, and the castles, arsenals, barracks, and batteries upon its summit, from whence the eye can behold the mountains of Lorraine, the meanders of the Rhine, and the countries through which it flows to a vast distance, and from which the beholder might almost think he could step into the clouds, are all roofless and dismantled. The citadel was erected by the order of the Prince Bishop Herman Hillinus, in the 12th century, upon the ruins of an ancient Roman building.
In the centre of the square, or parade upon the top, was formerly mounted the celebrated cannon, called “the Griffon,” as well known to the Germans as that called “Queen Anne’s pocket-piece” is to the English. The former merits the national pride which it has excited. It was cast at Francfort by the order of the Elector, Richard Greifenklau, weighed thirty thousand pounds, and was capable of projecting a ball of one hundred and eighty pounds, to a distance of sixteen miles. Close to the touch-hole there was the following inscription: “Vogel Grief heis ich, meinem gnädigen herrn von Trier dien ich, wo er mich heist gewanten, da will ich Thoren und mauren Zerspalten. Simon gos mich, 1528.” In English—“Griffon is my name, I serve my gracious master of Treves, I shatter gates and walls, whenever he commands me to exert my force. Simon cast me, 1528.” This rock was supplied with water from a well 280 feet deep, which occupied three years in digging, in the year 1481, and has a subterranean communication with Coblentz, dug out of the solid rock: the fortress was justly deemed, when properly garrisoned, impregnable. In the time of the Swedish war, the attacks of eighty thousand French troops on the southern side of it, and of forty thousand on the northern, could make no impression upon it; however, still maintaining its invulnerable character, it was destined to bend to a foe, before which all local advantage is useless, and all enterprise unavailing: after bravely sustaining a blockade for a whole year, by the troops of the French republic, the garrison having endured with the greatest fortitude almost every description of privation and misery, were obliged to surrender to famine, and capitulated on the 28th January, 1799; soon after which the French covered this mighty rock with the ruins of those wonderful fortifications, which had employed the skill of the ablest engineer to complete, and which, but for the want of food, would have defied the force of her assailing enemy to the end of time. The thal, or valley below, is justly celebrated for its fertility and romantic beauty.
Soon after our departure from Coblentz, we passed the island of Obewerth; and a little further on, on our left, the disemboguement of the river Lahn, which flows between two ancient and picturesque towns, called the Upper and Lower Lahnsteins, where the Rhine forms a considerable curve, and expands into the resemblance of a placid lake, adorned with two vast mountains, one crowned with a hoary watch tower, and the base of the other half encircled by a village, and the whole adorned by the captivating combinations of forest scenery, rich meadows, and hanging vineyards and orchards, amidst which, half embosomed in their foliage, the peasant’s peaceful dwelling every now and then gladdened the eye. This lovely view was soon exchanged for one of gloomy magnificence; before we reached Boppart, we entered a melancholy defile of barren and rugged rocks, rising perpendicularly from the river to an immense height, and throwing a shade and horror over the whole scene; here all was silent, and no traces of man were to be found but in a few dispersed fishermen’s huts, and crucifixes. Fear and superstition, “when the day has gone down, and the stars are few,” have long filled every cave with banditti, and every solitary recess with apparitions.
In the course of my passage I frequently, when the boat came very near the land, sprung on shore with two or three other passengers, and varied the scene by walking along the banks for a mile or two, and during these excursions had frequently an opportunity of admiring the astonishing activity and genius of the French, who have, since they became masters of the left bank of the Rhine, nearly finished one of the finest roads in the world, extending from Mayence to Cologne, in the course of which they have cut through many rocks impending over the river, and triumphed over some of the most formidable obstacles Nature could present to the achievement of so wonderful a design. This magnificent undertaking, worthy of Rome in the most shining periods of her history, was executed by the French troops, who, under the direction of able engineers, preferred leaving these monuments of indefatigable toil and elevated enterprize, to passing their time, during the cessation of arms, in towns and barracks, in a state of indolence and inutility.
The sombre spires of Boppart, surrounded by its black wall and towers, presented a melancholy appearance to the eye, relieved by the rich foliage of the trees in its vicinity, and the mountains behind it irregularly intersected with terraces covered with vines to their very summits. The antiquity of this city is very great; it was one of the fifty places of defence erected on the banks of the Rhine by Drusus Germanicus, and in the middle ages was an imperial city.
Not far from Boppart we saw, on the right bank of the river, a procession of nuns and friars returning to a convent, the belfry of which just peeped above a noble avenue of walnut-trees; they were singing, and their voices increased the solemn effect of the surrounding scenery. We put up for the night at a little village, amid mountains half covered with vineyards, tufted with forests, and chequered with convents and ruined castles. The evening was stormy, and a full moon occasionally brightened the scene: frequently we were enveloped in solemn gloom,
When the broken arches are as black as night,
And each shafted Oriel glimmers white,
When the cold light’s uncertain show’r,
Streams on the ruin’d central tow’r.
Lay of the last Minstrel.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE YOUNG CONSCRIPT ... SINGULAR FRENCH ANECDOTE ... ST. GOAR ... ITS HISTORY ... OBERWESEL ... THE PALATINATE ... A CELEBRATED VINEYARD ... A REGALE ... BACHARACH ... BACCHUS ... THE RHYNGAU SONG ... RÜDESHEIM ... ROMAN DERIVATIONS ... THE PRIORY OF JOHANNESBERG ... VINEYARDS CLASSED ... GRAPES CLASSED.
I have before mentioned the excellent accommodations which I have every where experienced at the different towns we stopped at. Although at the last place where we slept there were not above three or four houses, and we were not expected, we had an excellent supper, and clean comfortable beds. After our repast, as we were drinking some excellent hock, many of the company present communicated the object of their voyage, and amongst the rest an elegant young Frenchman, about nineteen, who had charmed us all the way by his politeness and inexhaustible flow of spirits, told us, to my no little surprise, that the object of his excursion would not admit of his returning when he pleased, for he was on his way to join part of the French army at Maynz, or Mayence, as a conscript; for which he had been drawn; and as his father who was a man of fortune at Aix-la-Chapelle, but was very fond of his money, would not put himself to the expense of paying the substitution money for him, “par conséquence,” said he with a smile of good humour, “il me faut aller en personne.” He told us that he had no hopes of raising himself from the ranks but by good conduct and equally good fortune, although his uncle was a general in the service, and commanded that part of the army into which he was soon to be incorporated. Whenever we stopped, he bestowed his money with liberality to beggars and chambermaids, alleging, that as he was about to be a soldier, he ought to live, when he became one, on a soldier’s pay, and that to have more till he was promoted, would only make him uncomfortable; adding, that on his arrival at head quarters, he should order a noble dinner, and give his clothes to the waiters, and surrender himself up to the captain of his company. He neither blamed the cruelty of his father, the tyranny of the conscription, nor repined at his unlucky fate, but filling a bumper, exclaimed, “Tout ce qu’il me faut maintenant, c’est, de devenir bon soldat.” “All that I have to do is to make myself a good soldier.” I never saw a point more easily and comfortably settled in my life. Our young conscript had the best wishes of us all, for his happiness and speedy promotion. This elastic spirit of vivacity seems to be the common property of every Frenchman, and never did it appear more striking than in the following circumstance: upon an English surgeon some years since visiting a hospital at Paris, he saw in one of the wards three Frenchmen who had received some very severe contusions by the fall of a scaffold a few days before, lying in bed; upon approaching them he found one dead, another dying, and the one in the middle sitting upright in the bed, fiddling to several invalids, who were dancing at the foot of it as well as they were able.
After a refreshing sleep we were called, upon the first intimation of the day’s approach, and early in the morning arrived at St. Goar, after passing by the ancient gothic tower of Welmich, the white and venerable palace of Thurnburg, crowning the mountain behind it, and through most delicious and romantic scenery, every where profusely embellished with the hoary remains of piety and war, under the various tints of progressive day. In a minute after the boat had stopped, all the passengers disappeared to attend matins, it being Sunday, and left me to gaze in amazement upon the stupendous rock of Rheinfels, or the rock of the Rhine, which rises most majestically behind the town, and supports the remains of a vast fortress which bears its name, and which the French demolished in the last war. This fortress was next in strength to that of Ehrenbreitstein; it was in the year 1245 converted from a convent to a fortress, by Count Diether le Riche. In 1692 the Hessians, who were in possession of it, made a gallant defence, headed by Colonel Goerz, against the French, who were in superior force under the command of the celebrated Mareschal de Tallard, who was compelled to give up the siege. In the last war it experienced a different fate: the French troops took quiet possession of it, and though it ranked next to Ehrenbreitstein in strength and advantage, it partook not of the glory of a similar resistance. At the foot of this enormous rock is a large barrack lately built, but now deserted. There was also a flying bridge here, but it has been removed.
In a bay of the river a little before we approached Oberwesel, there is a vast rock, which the passengers on the river never fail to address, for the purpose of hearing their own voices very closely imitated by its echoes. Almost all the way from St. Goar to Oberwesel, we were environed by enormous dark rocks covered with shattered fragments, impending over and embrowning the face of the river with their awful shadows. The gloom of the scene was enlivened only by a few fishermen’s huts here and there interspersed, protected from the intense heat of the sun retained by and reflected from the rocks rising above them, by the foliage of scanty groups of trees. This melancholy defile prepared us for Oberwesel, a venerable city, filled with the solemnity of ancient churches and deserted convents. In the time of the Emperor Henry the Seventh, this city was an imperial one; afterwards, and till the French seized it, it was in the possession of the Elector of Treves. The church of the Minorites had once a fine copy of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, by a disciple of his, which upon inquiry I found had been removed. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the situation of this town; the scenery to the south of it is luxuriant and romantic beyond imagination. Close to it, rising from an avenue of stately walnut-trees, is a prodigious rock, supporting the celebrated chateau de Schoenberg, which gave birth to the illustrious and ancient family of the name of Belmont, afterwards changed for the German name of Schoenberg or Beaumont: this place and the neighbourhood abound with slate quarries. Immediately opposite, on the eastern bank, lofty mountains clothed with hanging vineyards, and attended by the usual association of mural ruins perched upon their pinnacles, and of monastic buildings projecting from their sides, or rising from their base, presented their majestic forms to the Rhine. From Oberwesel we crossed over to Kaub, a fortified town a little way further to the south. Previous to this we had kept, during the whole of the passage, on the left bank. In crossing the river we passed close to a large massy fortified tower, or fort, standing in the middle of the Rhine upon a rock, called the Pfalz or Palatinate. In distant times the Countesses of the Palatinate, when they were far advanced in that state which
“Ladies wish to be who love their lords,”
used to remove to this insulated spot of gloom for the purpose of lying-in; afterwards it was used as a state prison, and a place to watch the vessels ascending or descending the Rhine, to prevent their eluding the tolls; it is now disused, but not likely very soon to run to decay for want of inhabitants. Enthusiastically as I admire the scenery of this part of the Rhine, I think I never saw a place where man or woman would less prefer to be confined in, than the Pfalz.
At Kaub, a very ancient but neat town, which stands at the base of a lofty mountain, in a handsome inn close to the river, we tasted some delicious wine, the produce of the neighbouring vineyards, for which we paid about ten pence English the bottle: and we were regaled gratuitously with some of the finest grapes, which a pretty girl produced as naturally as pipes and tobacco are introduced in similar places in Holland. The vineyards of Oberwesel, Kaub, and Bacharach, and the two hills of Vogtsberg and Kühlberg near the last city, which abound with blue slate, produce a vine remarkable for its odour and muscadelle flavour, and form one of the distinguished vine divisions of this enchanting region.
Upon leaving the Kaub we proceeded through a scene of transcendent richness and beauty, where
Palmy hilloc, and the flow’ry lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
On either side umbrageous grots, and caves
Of cool recess, on which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape.
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Our ears were delighted with the solemn choruses of the inhabitants of the villages returning in large crowded boats from their churches, and the bells of the convents, while the shores on either side were enlivened by the peasants in their sabbath dresses going to or returning from their respective places of worship. At length the hoary battlements of Bacharach opened upon us; part of this town slopes from the vine-clad mountain behind it, and the remainder is close to the water. This town is also very ancient, and as a proof of its antiquity, derives its name from Bacchus, to whom tradition relates an altar was raised upon a rock in the centre of the Rhine. Indeed we might have supposed that he had been worshipped here in all the marvellous pomp ascribed to his original adoration, and that his priestesses, by striking the earth with their thyrsi, had caused rivers of milk, and honey, and wine to flow
Et te, Bacche, vocant per carmina, læta, tibique
Oscilla ex altâ suspendunt mollia pinu.
Hinc omnis largo pubescit vinea fætu.
Virgil, 4 Georg.
This insulated rock was admirably adapted for bearing upon one of its trees, if ever one grew upon it, those little wooden or earthen images of Bacchus, which from the smallness of their mouths were called Oscilla, and were considered as so many watch towers, from which the god might look after the vines, to prevent their receiving injury. I know of no situation where he could have performed his tutelar duties better than in this very spot.
The vine here has been long celebrated for its excellence; the Emperor Venceslas preferred four fuder of this wine (a fuder is equal to three hundred and sixty gallons) to ten thousand florins offered to him by the inhabitants of Nuremberg, to redeem their sequestered privileges; and even Pope Pius the Second imported for his table a fuder of this wine annually. These are illustrious authorities in favour of the Bacharach wine, but the best is its flavour.
My laquais, a merry, good humoured fellow, and having no bad ear for music withal, announced our being opposite to Lorch, the first town where, in ascending the Rhine, the Rhingau commences, in which district the finest wines are produced, by singing a national song in honour of this vine-covered region, in which every person on board joined most cordially. It was a very long one, but the following stanzas will serve as a specimen of it.
Bekräntzt mit laub den liebe vollen becher,
Und trinkt ihn frölich leer;
In Ganz Europa ihr herren zecher,
Ist solch, ein wein micht mehr.
Ihn bringt das vaterland aus seiner fulle,
Wie wär er sonst so gut?
Wie wär er sonst so edel, stille,
Und doch voll kraft und muth?
Am Rhein, am Rhein, da wachsen unsre reben:
Gesegnet sey der Rhein!
Da wachsen sie am ufer hin, und geben
Uns diesen labe wein.
So trinkt ihn dann, und lasst uns alle wege
Uns freun, und frölich seyn;
Und wüsten wir, wo jemand traurig läge,
Wir gäben ihm den wein.
With vine-leaves crown the jovial cup,
For, search all Europe round,
You’ll say, as pleas’d you drink it up,
Such wine was never found.
Such wine, &c.
Our Father’s land this vine supplies,
What soil can e’er produce
But this, though warmed with genial skies,
Such mild, such generous juice?
Such mild, &c.
Then shall the Rhine our smiles receive,
For on its banks alone,
Can e’er be found a wine to give
The soul its proper tone.
The soul, &c.
Come put the jovial cup around,
Our joys it will enhance,
If any one is mournful found,
One sip shall make him dance.
One sip, &c.
Every child in this part of Germany knows this song by heart.
Fronting the august ruins of the castle of Sannek, the Rhine presents the appearance of an ample lake, and the mountains, which hitherto were numerous and lofty, recede as we approach the pretty village of Drgeckshausen, a little beyond which the river expands, and forms a noble curve near Asmanshausen, at the foot of a forest, celebrated for the convent of Aulenhausen, much frequented by devotees. Asmanshausen is known for the fine blecker which it produces.
Nearly opposite to Ruppertsberg the navigation of the Rhine becomes very much impeded, and rendered hazardous by some vast rocks which just raise their heads above the surface of the water, and which our boatmen informed us had frequently occasioned the loss of lives. Here the country again becomes rude and rocky, occasionally covered with forest oak, and profusely ornamented with dilapidated castles, where the steel-clad chieftains of other times used to blow their
——war note loud and long,
Till at the high and haughty sound
Rock, wood, and river rang around
Lay of the last Minstrel.
A visible change in the scenery to which we had been accustomed, commenced as we approached Bingen: the hills retire farther from the banks of the river, more modern towns, yet occasionally chequered with the remains of antiquity, attract the eye, the trees of the forest succeed to the vines of the mountain, and in the room of stupendous rocks, rich meadows and corn-fields present their novel charms.
Bingen, which I visited upon my return, stands at the base of a lofty mountain, on the summit of which the ancient castle of Klopp is erected: the river Nohe disembogues itself by this city into the Rhine, over which there is a handsome stone bridge, called Druses, from its having the reputation of having been constructed by Drusis Germanicus: this confluence of the two rivers enables Bingen to carry on a considerable trade in Rhenish wines, grain, and timber.
As the shades of evening descended, we passed Ehrenfels, and a little before nine arrived at Rüdesheim, where we supped at a very handsome hotel, and drank copiously of its wine, which is said to be superior to every other part of the Rhingau. Very early in the morning I visited the remains of a magnificent castle, which has the appearance of a Roman origin: this opinion is countenanced by the strong evidences of the same character which attach to the antiquities to be found in towns within the Rhingau. The situation of this august ruin, which is close to the river, is commensurate to its grandeur: the town of Rüdesheim is large, clean, and cheerful, and has few of those features of awful gloom which characterise several of the cities on the lower sides of this river, which here widens to a great breadth, and is dotted over with luxuriant little islands. Upon quitting this town we were more frequently retarded than we had been before, by the obstructions which terraces projecting into the river, and islands, offered to our towing horse, who, with the driver, was frequently belly deep in the water, which often forced our boatmen to the tedious application of their poles. The towns of Geisenheim, St. Bartholomaï, and Winkel, presented the same sprightly and agreeable aspect as Rüdesheim. I have observed that many towns in the Rhingau are of Roman derivation, in corroboration of which, many of their names are unquestionably so: as Winkel from Vinicella; Eltivil, from Alta Villa; and Lorch, or as the Germans pronounce it, Lorricke, from Laureacum, &c.
After quitting Rüdesheim, the noble priority of St. Johannesberg, proudly placed upon the summit of a vast mountain, surrounded with villages, hamlets, convents, nunneries, and other stately buildings, and having a back ground of distant hills covered with vines, commanded the admiration of all on board. This priory was founded in 1102, by Ruthard, second archbishop of Mayence, and in the devastating war of thirty years under Gustavus Adolphus, was rased to the ground. The land was afterwards sold to the abbot of Fuld, who rebuilt it in its present modern style, and afterwards it was given to the late Prince of Orange as an indemnity, and now forms a part of the rich territory of the Prince of Nassau Usingen. In a cave or cellar belonging to the priory, several thousands of hogsheads of the choicest wines are kept. The red blecker of Johannesburg is celebrated all over the world, and is the juice of the vineyard of the priory only; but the finest produce of the Rhingau is from the grape of Asmanshausen; Ehrenfels, and Rüdesheim, and particularly of some very small vineyards contiguous to them, called Rodtland, Hauptberg, and Hinterhausen, which rank the highest; and in this class also are included the numerous vineyards on the steep hills of Bingen, on the opposite shore. The second class embraces the vines of Rothenberg, Geisenheim, and Kapellgarten. The third class includes the grapes of Johannesberg, and the Fuldische Schlossberg. The fourth, the vines of Hattenheim, and Marker Brunner. The fifth, those of the cloister of Eberbach. Sixthly, those of Kitterich and Grafenberg; and the seventh, those of Rauenthal, and the hills and spots adjacent. All these classes are included in the district of the Rhingau.
The celebrated hock, is the produce of the vineyards of Hockheim, or High-home, above Mayence, to the eastward. Of the grape, that called the Reislinge, the longest known to these regions, ranks the highest; the Orleans grape, the orange or red Burgundy, and the Lambert, occupy the next place in the public estimation; and the Muscadelle and Kleimberg, which are frequently cultivated in private gardens, the third.
We still continued our course on the left bank of the Rhine, and passed by many beautiful villages, and the handsome towns of Haltenheim, Erbach, Elfeld, Steinheimerhof, Nieder or Lower Wallauf, where ancient churches and convents are interspersed amongst many handsome modern houses. We reached Nieder Wallauf, the last town of the Rhingau to the east, and afterwards Schierstein, a pretty town where, as our progress was so frequently delayed by the numerous islands which lie close to the bank, in company with a very pleasant, intelligent German, I quitted the boat, and walked to Biberich: the day was remarkably fine, and our road lay through luxuriant corn and pasture fields, vineyards, orchards, every where profusely adorned with castles, religious houses, picturesque cottages, and beautiful chateaus, behind which the vast forest of Landeswald extends to an immense distance: at length the numerous spires, and the lofty towers and palaces of Mayence opened upon us, from the opposite side of the river, and had a very venerable, and majestic effect.
CHAPTER XXV.
BIBERICH ... CHARLEMAGNE’S PALACE ... BRIDGE OF BOATS ... MAYENCE ... HORRORS OF WAR ... THE ART OF PRINTING ... THE HOCKHEIM HILLS ... REMARKS ON OLD HOCK ... THE TOOTH-BRUSH ... FRANCFORT ... SPLENDID TABLE D’HOTE ... INAUGURATION OF THE PRINCE PRIMATE ... ANECDOTES OF THE FRENCH ... THE FAIR.
Our entrance into an avenue of nearly a mile and a half in length, thickly lined with walnut, apple, pear, and plum trees, loaded with fruit, announced our approach to Biberich, the superb palace of the Prince of Nassau Usingen. As I made a drawing of this palace and the adjacent town when I descended the Rhine, and the boat was in a central part of the river, it will be unnecessary to describe it. I had no time to view the apartments, but my laquais informed me, that they were grand, and furnished in a princely manner: the town is modern, small, and very handsome. As we skirted Ingelheim, we were informed that the illustrious Charlemagne, the great prototype of Bonaparte, selected this place for his favourite residence, where he built a magnificent palace, which was supported by a hundred columns of Italian marble, and had an immense number of apartments, in which synods and the most important councils of state were held: that his son Louis le Debonnaire died broken-hearted here, in consequence of the rebellions of his sons Lotharius and Louis.
Not a vestige remains of this celebrated pile to prove that it once existed: but in the life of Louis le Debonnaire, Nigellus thus consecrates this building:
Est locus ille situs rapidi prope flumina Rheni,
Ornatus variis cultibus et dapibus.
Quo domus alta putet, centum perfixa columnis,
Quo reditus varii tectaque multimoda,
Mille aditus, reditus, millenaque claustra domorum
Acta magistrorum artificumque manu.
No doubt is entertained that that august pile once embellished this spot. Charlemagne could not have chosen a place more advantageous with regard to his political relations, or more beautiful in richness and variety of scenery, where Nature every where saluted him with wine, with fruit, and every desirable production of a genial soil, fit to make glad the soul of an emperor.
In less than an hour after quitting Ingelheim we reached Cassel, immediately opposite Mayence, to which it communicates by an amazing long bridge, formed of a moveable platform, placed upon fifty-six lighters, two or three of which draw out at pleasure by means of ropes and pullies, to open a passage for vessels ascending or descending the Rhine, and is 3830 feet long; one very similar to this was built by order of Charlemagne at the same place: here our voyage terminated. On account of the search of the custom-house officers being very severe on the French side, the passengers prefer being landed at Cassel: where all the bustle of a populous city, and a great military station, presented itself. The bridge was crowded with beautiful and elegantly dressed women, French officers, soldiers, and various other persons, in carriages and on foot, going to or returning from Mayence, which, with its venerable cathedral and splendid buildings, extending themselves along the river, had a very grand effect. Our luggage was searched by a German custom-house officer, who behaved very politely; and I proceeded to a good hotel in Cassel, and sat down with several French officers to some excellent refreshments.
In my description of the Rhine as I ascended it, I have, from the desire of not fatiguing my reader, only noticed the principal towns and objects, some of which I visited then, and others on my return. I felt myself abundantly rewarded by the unparalleled beauty and grandeur of those scenes, which so often excited my admiration and amazement, for any little inconvenience, and perhaps some little hazard, to which I was occasionally exposed, and I regret that I can only convey a very imperfect impression of them to those who have never had the good fortune to form their personal opinion of them.
Having been previously warned not to attempt to enter Mayence, which, as it is now incorporated with France, I shall call by that name, on account of the unusual rigour exercised by the police towards strangers, in consequence of the city being the great military depot of the French on the Rhine, and the greatest skill of their engineers having been lavished on its fortifications, I was content to view it from Cassel, and to receive some little account of it from a very intelligent German, who had resided there some years, as we looked upon the city from our hotel window. The electoral palace, of red brick, by the side of which the Rhine flows, where Bonaparte resided during his stay in Mayence, in 1804, presented a very noble appearance. The dome or cathedral, which rose with awful dignity before us, is a vast gothic pile, having four unequal towers: it had once a lofty spire, but a thunder-storm, many years since, beat it down with lightning, and burnt a considerable part of the edifice. Few cities have suffered more than this by the ravages of war; most of its civil and sacred buildings have been at one period or another damaged or destroyed by cannon, the ruins of which still remain. My intelligent friend informed me that this city was celebrated for the great beauty of its female inhabitants, and that before the French took possession of it the electoral court threw a brilliant lustre over the place, which was unrivalled by any city on the Rhine for its gaiety, elegance, and splendor; characteristics which have been impaired, but far from annihilated. It contains colleges, lyceums, a theatre, and ball and concert rooms, all of which continue to be well attended.
Mayence, from its having been always considered as one of the great bulwarks of Germany, suffered most dreadfully in the last war. In October, 1792, General Custine compelled it to surrender after a slight bombardment, and under his administration the majority of the inhabitants who did not fly entered cordially into the views of the French revolutionists: he augmented the fortifications of the city, and placed a strong garrison in the suburbs of Cassel, which has always been considered as a place of great importance, and raised a number of redoubts and batteries there. In July, 1793, the Prussians, after seizing on Costheim, and defeating an army under General Houchard, which was marching to succour the garrison of Mayence, reduced both that city and Cassel, the miserable inhabitants of which endured the greatest horrors, and many of the finest and most venerable buildings of the former were fired, and nearly destroyed, during the siege. Merlin, who acted as one of the commissioners to the French army during the siege, stated to the convention, that such was the scarcity of provisions, a pound of horse-flesh had been sold at two, and a dead cat at six livres, and that five thousand men had perished in defence of the place. Although Custine had no choice left but to capitulate, Barrere, by his report of the siege, led to his being denounced and decapitated. During this siege the palace of the provosts suffered terribly; the celebrated electoral palace called La Favorite, and seven churches, were totally destroyed; and scarce a house escaped without being pierced with cannon balls. Mutton sold for sixty sols a pound, and beef one hundred sols; and at last bell-metal and paper money were used: the following was the superscription of the latter:
“Monnoye de siége.
“10 sols,
“à changer contre billon
“ou monnoye du metal de siége.
(Signed) “Reubell.
“Siége de Mayence, “Houchard.
“Mar. 1793—2de. de la Rep. Fran.”
And, what an epicure will perhaps more regret, the whole vineyard of Hockheim was destroyed.
The French were highly indignant at the loss of so important a place, and resolved upon attempting the recovery of it from its victors, as soon as the mighty objects which claimed on all sides the activity and energy of their rulers and generals, were accomplished; and accordingly, in June 1795, the French army again blockaded this devoted city, during which it sustained a renewal of its suffering, from which it again was relieved by the successful operations of Mareschal Clairfayt, at the head of the Austrians against the revolutionary troops, who were attacked and routed upon the heights of Mornbach, when the Mareschal appeared before Mayence, attacked and carried the entrenched camp of the enemy, upon which the skill of their ablest engineers had been exerted for eleven months to render it invulnerable. General Schaal, who occupied this strong position, on the retreat of Jourdan, with fifty-two battalions of infantry and five regiments of cavalry, was obliged to retire with great loss in cannon, ammunition and men. In this bombardment some Tyrol sharp-shooters displayed their wonted skill in an amazing manner, by killing, from the banks of Cassel, several French officers with their rifle-pieces, who were walking on the ramparts on the opposite side of the river, the breadth of which I have already ascertained by the length of the floating bridge. In the beginning of the year 1797 a better destiny smiled upon the French arms in this region, and Moreau and Hoche made both sides of the Rhine resound with their victories, when the troops which garrisoned Mayence, to prevent the entire and unavailing demolition of the city, relinquished its possession, and the French remained masters of it.
Volumes have been written upon the superior pretension of Mayence to the original invention of the art of printing, and to transfer the honours of the discovery from Lawrence Coster of Haarlem to John Guttenburg, a citizen of this place. A vast deal of special pleading has been displayed on both sides; and, to use a jockey phrase, these racers for the merited gratitude and admiration of all who followed them, reached the goal almost “neck and neck,” but the majority of judgments given appropriate the glory to Coster: his mode was the simplest, and therefore thought to be the earliest; his moulds were made of wood and immoveable, and he stamped the paper only on one side: Guttenburg printed on both sides of the leaf with moveable metal types.
The extremity of the bridge towards Cassel, and all the ramparts and redoubts of the town, which are very strongly fortified, were occupied by French soldiers. With two German gentlemen and a Dutch officer, I set off for Francfort, distant eight stunder or hours, or four German miles, under a scorching sun, which did not seem to have any effect upon a large party of monks and priests, and followers, bearing the host, who were walking bare headed in procession to a monastery which we had just passed, near which I left the carriage to make a sketch of Mayence, upon a projecting bank of the river Maine, where I bade adieu to the Rhine. Our road lay through an avenue of walnut, apple, and pear trees, loaded with fruit, to which passengers helped themselves whenever inclination disposed them to do so; and part of the Hockheim hills, covered with the renowned vineyards, which produce what in England is called old hock. As many a saint, high in superstitious veneration, must have had at least ten skulls and one hundred toe nails, as if no illusion has been practised by those who have exhibited them to the credulous in different eras and various regions, so nothing short of the power of transmuting water into wine, could produce from these vineyards the immense quantity of wine which passes under the title of hock. Certain it is, that the greater quantity of wine honoured with that name, is from the grapes of both sides of the lower part of the Rhine. In the district where it is produced, very old genuine Hockheim wine is sold at the rate of three, and sometimes five, shillings a bottle.
At the first stage we stopped at a village where there is a noble building upon an eminence, commanding a beautiful prospect, which I at first took for a palace, but it proved to be a tobacco manufactory, warehouses, and the residence of the proprietor and his family; the front is five hundred feet long, and the whole exterior infinitely more princely than Buckingham-house. After passing this place the road became level, and the country presented corn-fields, pasture, and orchards in great abundance. For many miles round, this country had been often the theatre of hostilities; and though Nature had long since effaced their melancholy impressions from her fields by reviving verdure, yet prostrate cottages and battered convents displayed the march and ravages of the demon War! Happy, thrice happy my own country, where the sound of cannon is never heard but to announce a victory, or to augment the gaiety of some festive occasion!
The suburbs of Francfort are very delightful, and after passing over a draw-bridge, and through a deep, gateway, we entered the city, the streets of which are crowded and full of gaiety and bustle, in consequence of the great autumnal fair which was holding there. All the best inns were brimful, and with great difficulty the Dutch officer and myself procured a miserable double-bedded room, at an inferior inn, filled with petty merchants and their families, whom the spirit of traffic had led to this celebrated mart, and was half choked up with cases and boxes containing their merchandize. This town swarms with French soldiers, about thirty of whom slept in rooms adjoining to ours, where they deported themselves with great order. My companion had just returned from the Cape, in consequence of its surrender to the British arms. He spoke with liberal rapture of gallantry of the English troops. In Germany, as in Holland, time is taken by the forelock, and at six o’clock the stiefelputzer, or boot-cleaner, knocked at the door, followed by the chambermaid with a composition of frankincense and other gums of a pyramidal shape, and about an inch high, much used in Germany, called a Räucher-kerz, for perfuming rooms, which she placed upon our candlestick and left smoking. My Dutch companion annoyed me at this hour, first by begging that I would hear him read one book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a little English edition of which he had in his pocket, which he achieved in an incongruous mêlange of various languages; and secondly, by begging me to lend him my tooth-brush for a few minutes, observing, that he preferred an English tooth-brush to any other, and at the same moment applying it to his teeth with equal alacrity and gratification. After he had paid such a compliment to English tooth-brushes, and had done me the honour of using mine, the least I could do was to beg that he would favour me with keeping it for my sake, with which he was much pleased, and accordingly introduced it to a party of combs and razors in his shaving-case. In all other respects he was an agreeable man, and I am sure a liberal-minded soldier. This city, which was till lately imperial, is one of the most ancient towns in Germany, and has several handsome streets and noble buildings: it is particularly celebrated for the splendor of its hotels, which are reported to be the most magnificent in Europe, particularly those called the Rothen Haus or Red House, and the Rörniskchen Kaiser or Roman emperor, where the King of Prussia lodged when he visited this town; and the Darmstadter Hof, in which Mareschal Augerau and his suite resided whilst I was at Francfort: so crowded was the city, that it was with great difficulty and some interest I procured apartments at the Weiden-hof, or Willow-Court, a second rate inn, but of great magnitude. Our table d’hote, at which between two and three hundred persons of respectability sat down every day, was held in a noble room; it was splendidly served, and an excellent band seated in an elevated gallery, performed during dinner. The principal houses are built of red and white stone: the cassino, to which I was admitted by a card of introduction from one of the principal bankers, is very elegant. There are also several other clubs and assembly rooms. The theatre is spacious and very handsome, the performers were good, and the band is large and select. Opposite to the theatre is a mall, formed by several rows of trees, which in the evening is much frequented, where many a lover may exclaim with Moore,
Oh, Rosa! say “good night” once more,
And I’ll repeat it o’er and o’er,
Till the first glance of dawning light
Shall find us saying still “good night.”
Before the Rhenish confederation the town was split into two religious sects, the Lutherans and Calvinists, which are now blended in perfect harmony by the liberal influence of toleration. A grand discharge of cannon one morning announced the ceremony of the members of the senate and the colleges being about to assemble in the Römer, or town-hall, to complete the investing the Prince Primate with the sovereignty of the city, the keys having been delivered up before to the representative of the prince, under a similar discharge of artillery, agreeable to certain provisions contained in the act of the Rhenish confederation.
Curiosity induced me to visit the place of this meeting, which is a very large and ancient gothic pile, situated in a narrow street. In this building are several chambers, which have been applied to memorable purposes; one in particular, which before the late revolution in the German empire, was used by the Electors upon the august occasion of making choice of a new Emperor: there are some good paintings in some of these apartments. The ceremony of the installation of the Prince Primate was over in a very short time; the mob, which was a small one, soon dispersed; and scarcely any one mentioned the matter three days afterwards.
The cathedral church of St. Bartholomew, which belongs to the catholics, is another venerable relic of antiquity: it is reported to have been built by Pepin, king of France, in 756, enriched by Charlemagne, and plundered by Lewis of Bavaria, on account of its chapter adhering to the Pope. Strange to relate, although the coronation of the Emperor used to take place in it, there is not one object within its walls, either of sacred splendor, or monumental celebrity, worthy of notice. In the year 1792, when the French entered this city as conquerors, their commanding officers went with great military pomp to this cathedral; where, being attended by the senators, the commander in chief closed an address by exclaiming, “Under the roof of this venerable temple have not many of you witnessed the coronation of the Emperor of the Romans?” to which no answer was given. “I demand a reply to my question,” exclaimed the general with some warmth; “Yes” was faintly answered; “Then,” replied he, “you will never see him more in this place.” This prophecy issued from an oracle which possessed the means of consummating its prediction.
I was pleased with the fair, although it fell far short of my expectation; the principal booths which were erected near the Römer, and also parallel with the river Maine, formed a very agreeable and sprightly street, entirely covered with canvass awnings: here all sorts of goods, the productions of various parts of the globe, were exposed to sale; and here were also several booksellers’ stalls, where the most eminent works are sold folded in sheets, for the purchase of lesser merchants in the trade. No press in the world is so prolific as the German: the number of ingenious works which it annually yields, amongst which are many able productions, are astonishing. I was informed that the fair had wasted almost to nothing, in consequence of the various injuries it has sustained from the war, and the severe policy of Bonaparte respecting the introduction of English manufacture, very little of which was to be found at this mart. In the printers’ stalls, which used to be well supplied from the English school of engraving, were very few prints worthy of attention. I saw several execrable imitations of some from the exquisite pencil of Westall. At the end of the principal street of the fair, close to the river, were rows of immense tubs, in which, like Diogenes, many poor German tradesmen and their families very sagaciously eat and slept, for want of a better habitation.
CHAPTER XXVI.
BEAUTIFUL VILLAGE OF OFFENBACH ... BRAVERY OF THE HESSIANS ... ANECDOTES OF MARESCHAL AUGERAU ... EXCURSION TO DARMSTADT ... MINUTE-POSTS ... DARMSTADT ... LAW’S DELAY IN GERMANY ... AGREEABLE MANNERS OF THE GERMANS ... NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES ... RETURN TO FRANCFORT ... GLOOMY APPEARANCE OF THE CONTINENT ... FRENCH ARMY ON ITS MARCH AGAINST THE PRUSSIANS ... RETURN TO LONDON.
An excursion to the beautiful and elegant little sovereign town of Offenbach, about five English miles from Francfort, enabled me to admire the great progress which the Germans have made in the tasteful art of carriage-building. In a very large depot of carriages there, I saw several which would have been distinguished for their lightness and beauty in London. There are several other fabrics, viz. of jewellery, pocket-books, tobacco, toys, &c. The society of this place, where the prince who bears its name has a little court, is very refined and accomplished. The suburbs of Francfort are formed of beautiful and romantic walks and vineyards, enlivened by handsome country-houses. On the road near the entrance to the west, adjoining the splendid chateau of Mr. Beatham, the celebrated banker, at whose town house the present King of Prussia became enamoured with his Queen, is a monument, composed of a helmet, a lion’s skin, and emblems of war, in bronze, made out of the cannon taken by the King of Prussia from the French at Mayence, mounted upon a stone pedestal, rising from an artificial rock, upon which are inscriptions commemorative of its having been raised by Prince Williamstadt to the memory of the gallant Prince of Hesse-Phillipsthal and three hundred brave Hessians, who perished on this spot, when the French were obliged to evacuate the town in the year 1792. The French had taken quiet possession of it a few months before, under the command of General Neuwinger and Colonel Houchard, when they levied two millions of florins upon pain of military execution on the opulent classes of the inhabitants. The most distinguished personage in Francfort was Mareschal Augerau, whom I frequently met. The heroic valour and skill which he displayed in the campaigns of Italy, particularly at the battle of Arcole and before Mantua, and afterwards in Germany, will render his name illustrious in the military annals of France: he is a highly polished and accomplished gentleman, and was equally admired and esteemed by the inhabitants of Francfort; he lived in a style becoming his dignity, without ostentation, and was upon all occasions very accessible.
Linglebach, the celebrated painter, was born here in 1625. His subjects were fairs, mountebanks, sea prospects, naval engagements, and landscapes, in which he eminently excelled. In company with my two friends from whom I parted at Rotterdam, and who rejoined me here, I set off for Darmstadt, about eighteen English miles from Francfort. We crossed a noble bridge over the Maine, and passed through a considerable, and fortified town, called Saxenhausen. Our road, which was sandy, was for a considerable way lined with luxuriant nursery-grounds and vineyards. About four miles from Francfort we passed a plain oaken post, about six feet high, upon which, under a painted star and crown, was written (in German), “Sovereign Territory of the Prince Primate of the Rhenish confederation.” Upon this road I saw, for the first time, a great number of little posts, painted white and numbered; they are called minute-posts, by which the pedestrian traveller is enabled to ascertain with great exactness the progress he makes in his journey. A very handsome avenue of stately poplars, of nearly two English miles, forms the approach to the city, which is nearly surrounded by a lofty wall, not capable of affording much protection against an enemy. The suburbs contain some handsome houses, in which, as the principal hotel in the city was full, we took up our quarters at the post-house, a very excellent inn.
For a capital, Darmstadt is small, and its palace infinitely too large: of the latter the Emperor Joseph sarcastically observed, that it was big enough to accommodate himself and the nine electors. However, very little of the internal part is finished, and most of the windows are boarded up. The Grand Duke and his family reside in a part of a new palace, projecting from the old one, looking towards the gardens. That immense structure is built in imitation of the Thuilleries, and surrounded by a broad deep dry ditch. The hereditary Prince, who married the youngest daughter of the House of Baden, and whose sisters share the thrones of Russia and Sweden, has a large and handsome house at a little distance from the old palace; exclusive of this prince, his Royal Highness the Grand Duke, Louis the Tenth, has several other children. He is turned of fifty years of age, is an enlightened, brave, and amiable prince, and a celebrated engineer. He was the last of the German princes who in the last war sheathed the sword he had drawn against the French; a power which the preservation of his dignity and his dominion compelled him to coalesce with. Bonaparte, when he was digesting the Rhenish Confederation, wished to invest him with the kingly dignity, but the Grand Duke declined the offer. Darmstadt has produced many valiant and distinguished officers. At the parade I had the pleasure of seeing General Von Werner, the governor of the city, who at the head of the chevaux legers, or light horse, performed prodigies of valour in the Netherlands in the last war, where in one battle he was surrounded by seven French chasseurs, from whom he received the most desperate wounds in various parts of his body before he surrendered. The late General Von Düring, a name, on account of the heroic courage of the person to whom it belonged, for ever embalmed in the memory of the English who served in the last war in the Low Countries, in the years 1793, 4, 5, was born in this dutchy. The troops were good looking men, and presented a very soldier-like appearance: the uniform of the officers of the infantry is a blue coat faced with scarlet, a large cocked hat, richly trimmed with deep silver lace, and has a very handsome appearance. The dragoons wear a casket, a light green jacket, and are well mounted. The pay of a soldier is about the value of twopence a day. Several captains in the army are princes (princes appanages), or princes of a distant branch, who have but little property.
The principal object to attract the attention of a traveller is the Exercierhaus, or house for manœuvering the troops in the winter: it forms one side of the space of ground allotted for the parade, is three hundred and fourteen feet long, and one hundred and fifty-two broad, and has been erected about thirty-five years.
The ceiling of this enormous room is self-supported by a vast and most ingenious wooden frame-work, without the assistance of either pillar or arch below. Above this ceiling are a great number of apartments. In a part of the room below, the artillery of the Grand Duke is deposited, which is kept in high military order. About four thousand troops can be manœuvred in this room with ease. The gardens adjoining to the exercise-house are laid out in the English style, are very spacious, and would be very beautiful if the ground undulated a little more; much taste has been displayed in their arrangement, and the house of the chief gardener is very pretty. These gardens are liberally opened to the public, form the principal promenade, and were embellished on the day I visited them with several lovely and elegantly dressed women. In one part is a neat but simple mausoleum, erected by the order of Frederic the Great to the memory of one of the landgravines of Darmstadt, a princess remarkable for the powers of her mind and the beauty of her person: upon which is the following elegant inscription, composed by that great Prince:
“Hic jacet Ludovica Henricæ, Landgrafia Hessiæ,
“sexu fœmina, ingenio vir.”
“Here lies Louisa Henrietta, Landgravine of Hesse,
“a woman in form, in mind a man.”
A short distance from the garden is a park in which wild boars are kept for hunting. The religion of the dutchy is Lutheran. The affairs of the state are conducted by a court of regency, and other courts, composed of counsellors and a president, who regulate the military, administer the laws, digest the finance, and superintend all matters that relate to religion. Those who complain of “the law’s delay” in England, would be speedily reconciled to the tardity of its progress were they to commence a suit in Germany, where it excited considerable surprise that the procrastination of Mr. Hastings’ trial, which lasted seven years and three months, should have caused any murmurs amongst us, that period being thought a moderate one by almost every German. Living in this dutchy is very cheap: a bachelor can keep a horse, dine at the first table d’hôte, and drink a bottle of wine a day, and mingle in the best circles, upon one hundred pounds per annum. The society in Darmstadt is very agreeable. As the minds of the men and women are so highly cultivated and accomplished in Germany, every party presents some mode or other, equally delightful and blameless, to make Time smile, and to strew over his passage with flowers. The country round Darmstadt is very beautiful, and abounds with corn and various sorts of fruit-trees, which are frequently unprotected by any fence, and the common path winds through avenues of them. Amongst other delicious fruit, there is a red plumb called zwetschen, peculiar to the south of Germany, which grows in great richness and luxuriance in this dutchy. As a proof of the profusion in which it grows, in one of my rambles with some friends, I met a boy laden with a basket full of them, who sold us 130 for some little pieces, amounting to a penny English; and the little rogue looked back with an arch smile as we separated, as if he had made a highly profitable bargain. As I was walking in the principal street with a friend of mine, I was struck with the following expression: “Look at that officer; would you believe it that with so fine a person, and a mind to correspond with it, he has received two baskets?” My surprise at the expression was dissolved by being informed, that when a lady refuses an offer of love, she sends the luckless lover a little basket as a token of her disinclination to receive his addresses.
The French interest is powerful in Darmstadt, although amongst all the princes of the Rhenish confederation, no one has displayed more energy and spirit than the Grand Duke. A striking instance of this occurred to one of my companions: in this dutchy, and I believe in other parts of Germany, there is a law that renders it penal to drive off the road upon the grass, but the postillion who drove him, having, to spare his horses, offended against the law, archly turned round to him and said, “Pray, Sir, in case I should be prosecuted, say you are a Frenchman, and then they will not make me pay the penalty.”
The antipathy between the natives of Darmstadt and their neighbours of Hesse Cassel, is as inveterate as that between the English and French. As I was preparing to set off for Heidelburg, we heard that the troops of Darmstadt were expected to march at a moment’s notice to seize upon Hanau, a town belonging to Hesse Cassel, which has afforded frequent subject of broil between the two countries; but upon inquiry, we were privately informed, that Bonaparte was expected to call upon the Grand Duke to march his contingent to the field of battle against the Prussians, with whom immediate hostilities were thought to be inevitable. I much regretted that this approaching storm, which began to spread a deep shade over the political horizon, prevented me from extending my excursion further into Germany, a country to which Nature has been very bountiful, where the women unite refined accomplishments to the charms of person, and where the men are distinguished for their genius, probity, and indefatigable industry, and both for an unaffected urbanity of manners.
Upon my return to Francfort, part of the French army rushed in like a torrent, on its way to give the Prussians battle. It had rained very hard all the day on which the advance guard entered; but every soldier, although covered with mud, and wet to the skin, went, or rather danced, singing merrily all the way, to the house where he was to be quartered. This city has been dreadfully drained at various times, by the immense number of French troops which have been billeted upon the inhabitants: at one time they had fifty thousand to support, and to supply with various articles of clothing for six months. Every house had a certain number billeted upon them, according to its size and the opulence of the family. Upon their march the French are as little encumbered as possible; in their way they compel the farmer, butcher, baker, &c. to furnish them with what they want, for which notes are given by the proper officers, if they have no cash, to the seller, according to the price agreed upon, which is generally a very fair one, and which the paymaster in the rear of the army discharges upon coming up.
As the gathering tempest prevented me from penetrating into the south of Germany beyond Darmstadt, I applied to M. Bacher, the French minister, for permission to return pour changer to Rotterdam, by the way of Brussels, Antwerp, &c. but the old, shrewd politician, in a very crabbed manner refused, and ordered me to keep on the right bank of the Rhine. Thus was I obliged to retrace my steps; however, it enabled me again to contemplate the sublime and beautiful scenes of the Rhine, which I did in a boat, the cabin and roof of which were crammed with passengers to various cities on different sides of the river: the wind was against us, but the stream was strong, of which our boatmen availed themselves by placing the vessel transversely, and, without rowing or towing, in two days and a half we bade adieu to our voyageurs, a little before we reached Cologne, where we landed at Duitz, and retrod our steps, which enabled me here and there to correct errors and supply omissions. At Wesel we arrived at half past six o’clock in the evening, and found the gates shut, which compelled us to sleep upon straw at a little inn in the suburbs. At six the next morning, we beheld a sad massacre perpetrating by the engineers and soldiers of the garrison, upon all the trees in the neighbourhood that could conceal or assist an enemy in approaching the town, and for a similar reason several houses in the suburbs were marked for destruction. Such is the commencement of the horrors of war! The Prussians were expected to lay siege to this strongly fortified town in a few days, which induced the Grand Duke of Berg, who was in the citadel at the time, to have recourse to these severe preparations.
After pursuing our route through Amsterdam, where the great fair was holding, during which the Dutch character became absolutely lively, through Leyden and Rotterdam, at the last of which we were sadly annoyed about our necessary passports of departure, which require the signature of the King’s secretary at the Hague, and the countersign of a Dutch commissioner, appointed, during my absence, for such purpose at Rotterdam, in consequence of the French ambassador’s power over such matters having been withdrawn, we at length, like hunted hares, arrived at the spot from whence we started, viz. Maesland-sluys, where, after undergoing the vexation of more forms and ceremonies before our old friend the commodore, on board of his guard-ship, we embarked in the identical dismal galliot which brought us to Holland, and after expecting every moment an order of embargo, we got out to sea, where we endured no common misery for six days and nights, after which I landed again upon my beloved native country:
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.
King John, Act I. Scene 2.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.