ockings. The most
slipshod descriptions of every thing that has been described before;
sketches of peasant character taken from the beggars at the roadside;
national traits taken from the commonplaces of the _table-d'hote_, and
court _secrets_ copied from the newspapers--all are disgorged into the
Journal. We have, unfailingly, whole pages of setting suns, moonlight
nights, effulgent stars, and southern breezes. She gloats over pictures
of enraptured monks, and sees heaven in the eyes of saints, copied from
the painter's mistresses. If she goes to Italy, she tells us of the
banditti, the gondola, and St Peter's; gazes with solemn speculation on
the naked beauties of the Belvidere Apollo; and descants in an
ultra-ecstasy on the proportions of sages and heroes destitute of
drapery; winding up by an adventure, in which she falls by night into
the hands of a marching regiment, or band of smugglers setting out on a
robbery, and leaving the world to guess at the results of the adventure
to herself.

In all this farrago, she never gives the reader an atom of information
worth the paper which she blots. We have no additional lights on
character, public life, national feeling, or national advancement. All
is as vapid as the "Academy of Compliments," and as well known as
"Lindley Murray's Grammar." But why object to all this? Why not let the
scribbler take her way--and the world know that vineyards are green, and
the sky blue, if it desires the knowledge? Our reason is this,--such
practices actually destroy all taste for the legitimate narratives of
travel. Those trading tourists talk nonsense, until intelligence itself
becomes wearisome. They strip away the interest which novelty gives to
new countries, and by running their silly speculation into scenes of
beauty, sublimity, or high recollection, would make Tempe a counterpart
to the Thames Tunnel; Mount Atlas a fellow to Primrose Hill; and
Marathon a fac-simile of the Zoological Garden or Bartholomew Fair. The
subject is pawed, and dandled, and fondled, until the very name excites
nausea; and a writer of real ability would no more touch upon it, than a
great artist would paint St George and the Dragon.

This has been the history of the decline of works of imagination in
England. No sooner had Mrs Radcliffe touched the old monasteries with
her glorious pencil, than a generation of monk-describers and
ruined-castle-builders sprang up, until the very name of convent or
castle be