The cleanliness of the windows, the manner of paving and lighting the streets at Hanover, put us in mind a little of some country towns in the remoter provinces of England; and there seems to be likewise a little glimpse of British manners, dress, &c. breaking through the common and natural fashions of the country. This was very pleasing to us, but I wished the place grander; I do not very well know why, but we had long counted on comforts here as at home, and I had formed expectations of something much more magnificent than we found; though the Duke of York’s residence does give the town an air of cheerfulness it scarce could shew without that advantage; and here are concerts and balls, and efforts at being gay, which may probably succeed sometime. How did all the talk however, and all the pamphlets, and all the lamentations made by old King George’s new subjects, rush into my mind, when I recollected the loud, illiberal, and indecent clamours made from the year 1720 to the year 1750, at least till the alarm given by the Rebellion began to operate, and open people’s eyes to the virtues of the reigning family! for till then, no topic had so completely engrossed both press and conversation, as the misfortunes accruing to poor old England, from their King’s desire of enriching his Electoral dominions, and feeding his favourite Hanoverians with their good guineas, making fat the objects of his partial tenderness with their best treasures—in good time! Such groundless charges remind one of a story the famous French wit Monsieur de Menage tells of his mother and her maid, who, having wasted or sold a pound of butter, laid the theft upon the cat, persisting so violently that it had been all devoured by the rapacious favourite, that Madame de Menage said, “It’s very well; we will weigh the cat, poor thing! and know the truth:” The scales were produced, but puss could be found to weigh only three quarters, after all her depredations.
From HANOVER to BRUSSELS.
Travelling night and day through the most dismal country I ever yet beheld, brought us at length to Munster, where we had a good inn again, and talked English. Well may all our writers agree in celebrating the miseries of Westphalia! well may they, while the wretched inhabitants, uniting poverty with pride, live on their hogs, with their hogs, and like their hogs, in mud-walled cottages, a dozen of which together is called by courtesy a village, surrounded by black heaths, and wild uncultivated plains, over which the unresisted wind sweeps with a velocity I never yet was witness to, and now and then, exasperated perhaps by solitude, returns upon itself in eddies terrible to look on. Well, the woes of mortal man are chiefly his own fault; war and ambition have depopulated the country, which otherwise need not I believe be poor, as here is capability enough, and the weather, though stormy, is not otherwise particularly disagreeable. January is no mild month any where; even Naples, so proverbially delicious, is noisy enough with thunder and lightning; and the torrents of rain which often fall at this season at Rome and Florence, make them unpleasing enough. Nor do I believe that the very few people one finds here are of a lazy disposition at all; but it is so seldom that one meets with the human face divine in this Western side of Germany, that one scarce knows what they are, but by report.
The town of Munster is catholic I see; their cathedral heavily and clumsily adorned, like the old Lutheran church called Santa Sophia at Dresden. One pair of their silver candlesticks however are eight feet high, and exhibit more solidity than elegance. They told us something about the three kings, who must have lost their way amazingly if ever they wandered into Westphalia, and deserved to lose their name of wise men too, I think. We were likewise shewn the sword worn by St. Paul, they told us, and a backgammon table preserved behind the high altar, I could not for, my life find out why; at first our interpreter told us, that the man said it had belonged to John the Baptist, but on further enquiry we understood him that it was once used by some Anabaptists; as that seemed no less wild a reason for keeping it there, than the other seemed as an account of its original, we came away uninformed.
Of the reason why Hams are better here than in any other part of Europe, it was not so difficult to obtain the knowledge, and the inquiry was much more useful.
Poor people here burn a vast quantity of very fine old oak in their cottages, which, having no chimney, detain the smoke a long time before it makes its escape out at the door. This smoke gives the peculiar flavour to that bacon which hangs from the roof, already fat with the produce of the same tree growing about these districts in a plenty not to be believed. Indeed the sole decoration of this devasted country is the large quantity of majestic timber trees, almost all oak, living to such an age, and spreading their broad arms with such venerable dignity, that it is they who appear the ancient possessors of the land, who, in the true style of Gothic supremacy, suck all the nutriment of it to themselves, only shaking off a few acorns to content the immediate hunger of the animal race, which here seems in a state of great degeneracy indeed, compared to those haughty vegetables.
This day I saw a fryar; the first that has crossed my sight since we left the town of Munich in Bavaria. On the road to Dusseldorp one sees the country mend at every step; but even I can perceive the language harsher, the further one is removed from Hanover on either side: for Hanover, as Madame de Bianconi told me at Dresden, is the Florence of Germany; and the tongue spoken at that town is supposed, and justly, the criterion of perfect Teutsch.
The gallery of paintings here shall delay us but two or three days; I am so very weary of living on the high roads of Teuchland all winter long! Gerard Dow’s delightful mountebank ought, however, to have two of those days devoted to him, and here is the most capital Teniers which the world has to show. Jaques Jordaens never painted any thing so well as the feast in this gallery, where there are likewise some wonderful Sckalkens; besides Rembrandt’s portrait of himself much out of repair, and old Franck’s Seven Acts of Mercy varnished up, as well as the martyrdoms representing some of the persecutions in early times of Christianity; these might be called the Seven Acts of Cruelty—a duplicate of the picture may be seen at Vienna. When one has mentioned the Vanderwerfs, which are all sisters, and the demi-divine Carlo Dolce in the window, representing the infant Jesus with flowers, full of sweetness and innocent expression, it will be time to talk of the General Judgment, painted with astonishing hardihood by Rubens, and which we stopt here chiefly to see. The second Person of the Trinity is truly sublime, and formed upon an idea more worthy of him, at least more correspondent to the general ideas than that in Cappella Sestini; where a beholder is tempted to think on Julius Cæsar somehow, instead of Jesus Christ—a Conqueror, more than a Saviour of mankind.