least
favourable points of the country and people she visits; exaggerates them
when she finds them, and invents them when she does not. For the
beauties of the country she has neither eye nor feeling; she
intentionally avoids speaking of them, and her book is meant, like that
of Nicolai, to operate as a warning, and scare away travellers. The good
lady says this very explicitly. 'Travellers are beginning to turn their
attention a good deal to the north, for the south is becoming
insufficient to gratify that universal rage for rambling, with which I
myself, as a true child of the century, am also infected. But the north
is so little known--I, for my part, only knew it through Dahl's poetical
landscapes--that one feels involuntarily disposed to deck it with the
colours of the south, because the south is beautiful, and the north is
said also to be so. Thus one is apt to set out with a delusion, and I
think it will therefore be an act of kindness to those who may visit
Sweden after me, if I say exactly how I found it.' Uncommonly good,
Gustavus the second. But it would be unfair to Nicolai to assert that
his book is as dull and nonsensical as that of the Countess Hahn-Hahn.
He went to Italy with the idea that it never rained there, and that
oranges grew on the hedges, as sloes do with us. This was childish, and
one could not help laughing at it. But when his imitatress perpetually
laments and complains, because on the Maeler lake, under the 59th degree
of latitude, she does not find the sultry southern climate--it becomes
worse than childish, and one is compelled to pity her. The Countess
chanced to hit upon a cool rainy month for her visit--I am wrong, she
was not a month in Scandinavia altogether--and thereupon she cries out
as if she were drowning, and despises both country and people."

It is easy to understand that there can be little sympathy between the
Countess Hahn-Hahn, an imaginative and somewhat capricious fine lady,
with strong aristocratic and exclusive tendencies, and such a
matter-of-fact person as Mr Boas, who, in spite of his sentimentality,
which is a sort of national infirmity, and although he informs us in one
part of his book that he is a poet, leans much more to the practical and
positive than to the imaginative and dreamy, and we moreover suspect is
a bit of a democrat. Having, however, taken the Countess _en grippe_, as
the French call it, he shows her no mercy, and, it must be owned,
displays some