DRESDEN;
Whither we arrive safe this 4th of December,—
——A wond’rous token
Of Heav’n’s kind care, with bones unbroken!
As the ingenious Soame Jenyns says of a less hazardous drive in a less barbarous country I hope: but really to English passengers in English carriages, the road from Prague hither is too bad to think on; while nothing literally impels one forward except the impossibility of going back. Lady Mary Wortley says, her husband and postillions slept upon the precipices between Lowositz and Aussig; but surely the way must have been much better then, as all the opium in both would scarce have stupefied their apprehensions now, when a fall into the Elbe must either have interrupted or finished their nap; because our coach was held up every step of the journey by men’s hands, while we walked at the bottom about seven miles by the river’s side, suffering nothing but a little fatigue, and enjoying the most cloudless beautiful weather ever seen. The Elbe is here as wide I think as the Severn at Gloucester, and rolls through the most varied and elegant landscape possible, not inferior to that which adorns the sides of the little Dart in Devonshire, but on a greater scale; every hill crowned with some wood, or ornamented by some castle.
As soon as we arrived, tired and hungry, at Aussig, we put our shattered coach on board a bark, and floated her down to Dresden; whither we drove forward in the little carts of the country, called chaises, but very rough and with no springs, as our very old-fashioned curricles were about the year 1750. The brightness of the weather made even such a drive delightful though, and the millions of geese on and off the river gave animation to the views, and accounted for the frequency of those soft downy feather-beds, which sooth our cares and relieve our fatigue so comfortably every night. Hares will scarce move from near the carriage wheels, so little apprehensive are they of offence; and the partridges run before one so, it is quite amusing to look at them. The trout in these great rivers are neither large nor red: I have never seen trout worth catching since I left England; the river at Rickmansworth produces (one should like to know why) that fish in far higher perfection than it can be found in any other stream perhaps in Europe.
The being served at every inn, since we came into Saxony, upon Dresden china, gives one an odd feel somehow; but here at the Hôtel de Pologne there is every thing one can wish, and served in so grand a style, that I question whether any English inn or tavern can compare with it; so elegantly fine is the linen, so beautiful the porcelaine of which every the meanest utensil is made; and if the waiter did not appear before one dressed like Abel Drugger with a green cloth apron, and did not his entrance always fill the room with a strong scent of tobacco, I should think myself at home again almost. This really does seem a very charming town; the streets well built and spacious; the shops full of goods, and the people willing to shew them; and if they do cut all their wood before their own doors, why there is room to pass here without brawling and bones-breaking, which disgusts one so at Vienna; it seems lighter too here than there; I cannot tell why, but every thing looks clean and comfortable, and one feels so much at home. I hate prejudice; nothing is so stupid, nothing so sure a mark of a narrow mind: yet who can be sure that the sight of a Lutheran town does not afford in itself an honest pleasure to one who has lived so long, though very happily, under my Lord Peter’s protection?
Here Brother Martin has all precedence paid him; for though the court are Romanists, their splendid church here is called only a chapel, and they are not permitted to ring the bell, a privilege the Lutherans seem much attached to, for nothing can equal the noise of our bells on a Sunday morning at Dresden.
The architecture is truly hideous, but no ornaments are spared; and the church of Notre Dame here is very magnificent. The china steeples all over the country are the oddest things in the world; spires of blue or green porcelaine tiles glittering in the sun have a strange effect. But nothing can afford a stronger proof that crucifixes, Madonnas, and saints, need not be driven out of churches for fear they should be worshipped, than the Lutherans admission of them into theirs; for no people can be further removed from idolatry, or better instructed in the Christian religion, than the common people of this town; where a decent observation of the sabbath struck me with most consolatory feelings, after living at Paris, Rome, and Florence, where it is considered as a merry, not a holy day at all! and though there seems nothing inconsistent or offensive in our rejoicing on the day of our Lord’s resurrection, yet if people are encouraged to play, they will soon find out that they may work too, the shops will scarcely be shut, and all appearance of regard to the fourth commandment will be done away. The Lutherans really seem to observe the golden mean; they frequent their churches all morning with a rigorous solemnity, no carts or business of any sort goes forward in the streets, public and private devotion takes up the whole forenoon; but they do not forbear to meet and dance after six o’clock in the evening, or play a sober game for small sums at a friend’s house.