No body ever mentions that Inspruck is subject to fires, and I wonder at it, as the roofs are all wood cut tile-ways; and heavily pensile, like our barns in England, for the snow to roll off the easier.
Well! we are far removed indeed from Italian architecture, Italian sculpture, and Italian manners; but here are twenty-eight old kings, or keysers, as our German friends call them, large as life, and of good solid bronze, curiously worked to imitate lace, embroidery, &c. standing in two rows, very extraordinarily, up one of their churches. I have not seen more frowning visages or finer dresses for a long time; and here is a warm feel as one passes by the houses, even in the street, from the heat of the stoves, which most ingeniously conceal from one’s view that most cheerful of all sights in cold weather, a good fire. This seems a very unnecessary device, and the heated porcelain is apt to make one’s head ache beside; all for the sake of this cunning contrivance, to make one enjoy the effect of fire without seeing the cause.
The women that run about the town, mean time, take the nearest way to be warm, wrapping themselves up in cloth clothes, like so many fishermen at the mouth of the Humber, and wear a sort of rug cap grossly unbecoming. But too great an attention to convenience disgusts as surely as too little; and while a Venetian wench apparently seeks only to captivate the contrary sex, these German girls as plainly proclaim their resolution not to sacrifice a grain of personal comfort for the pleasure of pleasing all the men alive.
How truly hateful are extremes of every thing each day’s experience convinces; from superstition and infidelity, down to the Fribble and the Brute, one’s heart abhors the folly of reversing wrong to look for right, which lives only in the middle way; and Solomon, the wisest man of any age or nation, places the sovereign good in mediocrity of every thing, moral, political, and religious.
With this good axiom of nequid nimis[48] in our mouths and minds, we should not perhaps have driven so very hard; but a less effort would have detained us longer from the finest object I almost ever saw; the sun rising between six and seven o’clock upon the plains of Munich, and discovering to our soothed sight a lovely champain country, such as might be called a flat I fear, by those who were not like us accustomed to a hilly one; but after four-and-twenty hours passed among the Alps, I feel sincerely rejoiced to quit the clouds and get upon a level with human creatures, leaving the goats and chamois to delight as they do in bounding from rock to rock, with an agility that amazes one.
Our weather continuing particularly fine, it was curious to watch one picturesque beauty changing for another as we drove along; for no sooner were the rich vineyards and small inclosures left behind, than large pasture lands filled with feeding or reposing cattle, cows, oxen, horses, fifty in a field perhaps, presented to our eyes an object they had not contemplated for two years before, and revived ideas of England, which had long lain buried under Italian fertility.
Instead of lying down to rest, having heard we had friends at the same inn, we ran with them to see the picture gallery, more for the sake of doing again what we had once done before at Paris with the same agreeable company, than with any hope of entertainment, which however upon trial was found by no means deficient. Had there been no more than the glow of colouring which results from the sight of so many Flemish pictures at once, it must have struck one forcibly; but the murder of the Innocents by Rubens, a great performance, gave me an opportunity of observing the different ways by which that great master, Guido Rheni, and Le Brun, lay hold of the human heart. The difference does not however appear to me inspired at all by what we term national character; for the inhabitants of Germany are reckoned slow to anger, and of phlegmatic dispositions, while a Frenchman is accounted light and airy in his ideas, an Italian fiery and revengeful. Yet Rubens’s principal figure follows the ruffian who has seized her child, and with a countenance at once exciting and expressive of horror, endeavours, and almost arrives at tearing both his eyes out. One actually sees the fellow struggling between his efforts to hold the infant fast, and yet rid himself of the mother, while blood and anguish apparently follow the impression her nails are making in the tenderest parts of his face. Guido, on the contrary, in one of the churches at Bologna, exhibits a beautiful young creature of no mean rank, elegant in her affliction, and lovely in her distress, sitting with folded arms upon the fore-ground, contemplating the cold corpse of her murdered baby; his nurse wringing her hands beside them, while crowds of distracted parents fill the perspective, and the executioners themselves appear to pay unwilling obedience to their inhuman king, who is seen animating them himself from the top of a distant tower.—Le Brun mean time, with more imagination and sublimity than either, makes even brute animals seem sensible, and shudder at a scene so dreadful; while the very horses who should bear the cruel prince over the theatre of his crimes, snort and tremble, and turning away with uncontrollable fury, refuse by trampling in their blood to violate such injured innocence!—Enough of this.
The patient German is seen in all they shew us, from the painting of Brughuel to the music of Haydn. A friend here who speaks good Italian shewed us a collection of rarities, among which was a picture formed of butterflies wings; and a set of boxes one within another, till my eyes were tired with trying to discern, and the patience of my companions was wearied with counting them, when the number passed seventy-three: this amusement has at least the grace of novelty to recommend it. I had not formed to myself an idea of such unmeaning, such tasteless, yet truly elaborate nicety of workmanship, as may be found in the Elector’s chapel, where every relic reposes in some frame, enamelled and adorned with a minuteness of attention and delicacy of manual operation that astonishes. The prodigious quantity of these gold or ivory figures, finished so as to require a man’s whole life to each of them, are of immense value in their way at least, and fill one’s mind with a sort of petty and frivolous wonder totally unexperienced till now, bringing to one’s recollection every hour Pope’s famous line—
Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around!