Various, that the mind of desultory man, studious of change and pleased with novelty, may be indulged-Cowp. Vol. VI. Philadelphia, Saturday, October 22, 1808. For The Port Folio. TRAVELS. ORIGINAL PAPERS. LETTERS FROM GENEVA AND FRANCE. Written during a residence of between two and three years in different parts of those countries, and addressed to a lady in Virginia. (Continued from page 244.) LETTER LI. OUR driver had served for some years in a Swiss regiment in the British service: he liked us for the language we spoke, though we told him we were not Englishmen, and did all in his power to oblige e and to entertain us: there was no possibility of being accommodated at any of the little towns with barbarous names we stopt at, for the same reason which had compelled us to quit Brieg, and we travelled on towards Sider, where we did not arrive till twelve at night: our driver was a strong, active, well-looking man, of about thirty-five, he wore a round hat, a blue great coat, and the most No. 17. monstrous pair of shoes in point of size, which I ever beheld: he was fair, with light coloured hair and blue eyes, and might have acted one or other of the two Amphytrions to admiration, with a friend of ours, whom you have seen at K: there is something very unaccountable in the strong likeness that is sometimes perceived betwen persons who cannot possibly be in any degree related. You remember, no doubt, the answer of a young man to Augustus Cæsar upon that subject; it is one of the best examples I know, of what the French call naiveté, and which we have no name for. Our course was nearly West in the direction of the Rhone, and though the night came upon us, while we had still several miles. to go, our conductor and his horse, who were perfectly well acquain ted with the road, went as rapidly downhill, as if it had been mid day. We now and then approached the river, which seemed to stance of situation has enabled them to resist the violence of the river, but as they consist altogether, it seems, of pebbles from all the various sorts of rocks, which are to be found in the neighbouring mountains, they originally must have been deposited here by the water at some very distant period: the Bailiff of Cevio was certainly in the right, the world is much older than people make it: Sion is a small but well-built town; it was taken by storm in 1801, and suffered all that towns generally do upon such occasions. rush along with a degree of frightful velocity, and crossed the beds of several torrents. Of the country we could see nothing, but we frequently passed over places where some action had taken place during the war, and which our conductor, who had shared in all the struggles of his fellow countrymen, pointed out to us: it was here, he said, as we were finding our way through a wood, that the French surprised our main guard, but we took ample vengeance upon them the day after. That large stone covers the mouth of a cavern, where a band of robbers secreted themselves for upwards of a year. At length we crossed the Rhone, and arrived at Sider, where the house was so full, that all the accommodation we could procure was a mattress spread upon the floor of a room, where there were already three beds with each two people in it, besides a large dog, who lay at the feet of one of the persons asleep: it would require the talents of Scarron to paint some of the adventures of such a night; once I was awakened by any villages had been burnt, and Watchman chanting the hour in barbarous sounds under the window, and another time by a battle between the dog and a person who came into the room, in order to find a place to lay himself down. We got to Sion early the next morning through a well-cultivated country; the valley was become broader, some attempts had been made to resist the devastations of the Rhone, and the vineyards and corn fields extended as high as cultivation could effect any thing, up the opposite mountains. The view was diversified too by several little conical hills, which rise from between forty and fifty to two hundred feet above the surface of the valley; some circum I remember our thinking war a very dreadful calamity in America, but there is no more comparison between our revolutionary war, and the wars of Europe, that of the Vallais, and of Switerzand in particular, than between the sports of children and the fight of devils. A humane Lady,* whom I know, came into this country after the campaign of 1801 with various articles, and with money, which she had collected in addition to what she herself liberally supplied: ma the inhabitants had disappeared'; Madame Cazenove. Berne first afforded the directory | an excuse for interfering in the concerns of Switzerland; who had been even fastidiously jealous of the rights of man, took an active part upon this occasion, and signalized the arms of their new republick in this diabolical warfare; but you need not be solicitous about their being punished for such conduct, and for the evils which they had drawn down upon what was once the happiest country on earth; they are moving rapidly towards that gulf, which swallows up so many r neighbouring states, and will have leisure to repent hereafter. I should have derived a great deal of information at Sion, even from the sort of people I met with accidentally, had itnot been for the insurmountable difficulty of another language at the large inn we stopt at, there was a waiter who spoke French, but on my asking for a barber and hair dresser, there came in one of the stoutest women I ever beheld, in order, as we understood, to make a tender of her services, but in sounds the most remote from Italian that I had yet heard. We procured another car at Sion and soon arrived at the little town of St. Pierre, where, as if by magick, every body spoke French, and the mistress of the house declared to me that she had not the least idea of German. We now went for the first time, into a Vallaisan church, and it was melancholy to see the rudely carved images set off with a little frippery and tinsel, which bore the names of some of the most respectable of the celestial Hierarchy: a book has been written, I believe, to point out the resemblance of many usages of the Roman church with those of Paganism; and I can conceive how good policy required, that as many of the ancient ceremonies should be retained, as were not inconsistent with Christianity, but the transmission of honour and admiration which has taken place is, in some cases, ludicrous and absurd. Moses, as Pope observes, has usurped the ensigns of Pan, and the Virgin has succeeded to the places of Diana, of Juno Lucina, and even of Venus, all graceless as she was it is to the Virgin that in a seamen offer their up prayers storm, it is to her that those who have been saved from shipwreck offer up their thanks, and mothers with their infant children in their arms, prostrate themselves before her altar, in silent and grateful adoration: there is no authority for this in Scripture, but it is not injurious to religion; and our Protestant divines are perhaps wrong, in wishing to submit the articles of faith and the principles of the Christian doctrine so much to the test of reason: it would be better surely to call in the charms of a chastened imagination, the sensibility of a tender heart, and the powers of eloquence to the aid of that religion, which all divine as it is, must be practised by a parcel of frail human creatures: why deprive the poor wretch who is on the brink of eternity, of the consoling idea, that the priest by his bed side, stands like a powerful interceder between God and him? and that a second Baptism conveying in its materials an emblem of incorruptibility is about to release his soul from all mortal ties? Why prevent superstition, if we are to call it by that name, from converting the agonies of death into a sweet, and gentle sleep? You will one day or other, read what Chateaubriand, who is open upon the table before me, says upon this subject. The loss of friends in the revolution, of a mother, a sister, a father and a brother, and many years of poverty and of exile, have perhaps affected his imagination, and such a guide, in matters of religion, is not to be altogether trusted; in vindicating the claim of Christianity to every species of inferiour merit as well as to the highest, to an originality of worship and to a union with the finer arts, he deviates at times into something very like paganism, nor does it require less than all the pomp of language to preserve the dignity of his narration. I admire his attempt however, and agree with him, that something more than reason is wanting to fill up abysses of the human heart: as I may not again have occasion to mention this authour, I will inform you now of what does him infinite honour, and puts the seal of sincerity at least upon his assertions: the political events which had deprived him of his friends, had also robbed him of his fortune, and his principal dependance was on the emoluments of an employment which he held under the consular government; this he without a moment's hesitation gave up upon a certain event which seems to have united the sympathy of all France, and to have been lamented with curses, which, as Shakspeare says, were not loud, but deep, retiring into obscurity and exposing himself to the chance of want, rather than to remain under obligations to those whose conduct he thought so highly reprehensible. To return to the little church I was speaking of, there were several ex-votaries before the altar, one of which, was a picture representing two persons as borne across a rapid stream upon the back of the same horse: they were stretching out their arms in the act of making a vow, and a number of little angels were seen coming down to assist them, as the newly born seanymphs did the ship of Eneas. A I was speaking of what I had seen to the landlady of our inn, when she showed me a picture founded, as she said, upon a fact, that happened in her family. priest in the habit of his order was seen exorcising a person out of whose mouth there proceeded a little devil about the size of a frog. You will think it strange, that such a representation should convey conviction to the minds even of the most ignorant people in an obscure village of the Vallais; but what are we to think of Boswell, the Biographer of Samuel Johnson, who had some wit, and who was the cause of a great deal of wit in others, when he plumes himself upon having been the first to suggest, that epileptick fits were in all probability occasioned, by the residence of evil spirits in the persons affected! | xx.) he has related many of adventures, and that when on his pedestrian tour through Flanders and France, as he had some knowledge of musick, he turned what had formerly been his amusement into a present means of subsistence. I passed (says he) among the harmless peasants of Flanders, and among such of the French as were poor enough to be very merry; for I ever found them spritely in proportion to their wants. Whenever I approached a peasant's house towards nightfall, mired authour, will have some influence over the younger gentlemen and students in our universities, who, whether they be solicitous to speak or to write well, will infallibly accomplish their object much sooner by reading the Vicar of Wakefield, or the Citizen of the World, than by mouthing any oration from the wonderful era of the Boston massacre in 1770, down to the last dull rumble of July thunder. Indeed, every generous youth in the country should make it a point and a principle to consult the great English authours with the most assiduous care, and turn away with loathing from juvenile trash,whe-1 played on the German flute one ther the disgraceful production of Europe or America. The very bane of style is the habit of reading the vulgar vehicles of Democratick folly, the penny pamphlets of ephemeral imbecility, the vile translations and viler imitations of French fustian, with which so many of our This, That, and Tother Gazettes are covered, as with so many cobwebs. Every highspirited ed young man, ambitious to write correctly and elegantly, in the style of a scholar and a gentleman, should avert his eyes from false models, and gaze steadfastly Pon the I true. Let Sir William Temple, Dean Swift, Lord Bolingbroke, Dry of my most merry tunes, and that procured me not only a lodging, I once or twice attempted to play but subsistence for the next day. for people of fashion; but they always thought my performance odious, and never rewarded me, even with a trifle. This was to me the more extraordinary; as whenever I used in better days to play for company, when playing was my amusement, my musick never failed to throw them into raptures, and the ladies especially; but as it was now my only means, it was received with contempt: a derrate those talents by which a man is supported!" At the different monasteries in his tour, especially those of his own nation, his learning generally procured him temporary entertainment; and thus he made his way to Switzerland, in which country he first cultivated his poetical talents with any particular effect; for here we find he wrote about two hundred lines of his "Traveller." den, Addison, Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith be his constant compa-proof how ready the world is to unnions. In such society he will hearken to very different language from that detestable dialect, the fashionable jargon of the mobs of America. For this sort of style, and for the infamous principles it is employed to inculcate, the writer of this article has such an habitual abhorrence, that were he a guardian or a preceptor, he would not suffer his ward or pupil to be debased by its use, or to associate with its authours. Both they and their expressions are equally contemptible. Let us think like Johnson, and write like Goldsmith. (Continued from page 252.) It is generally understood, that in the history of his Philosophick Va. gabond (Vicar of Wakefield, chap. The story which has commonly been told, of his having acted as travelling tutor to a young miser, is now thought to have been too hastily adopted from the aforesaid History of a Philosophick Vaga |