The Tyrolese Alps are not as beautiful as those of Savoy, though the
river that runs between them is wider too; but that very circumstance
takes from the horror which constitutes beauty in a rocky country,
while a navigable stream and the passage of large floats convey ideas
of commerce and social life, leaving little room for the solitary
fancies produced, and the strokes of sublimity indelibly impressed, by
the mountains of La Haute Morienne. The sight of a town where all the
theological learning of Europe was once concentred, affords however much
ground of mental amusement; while the sight of two nations, not naturally
congenial, living happily together, as the Germans and Italians here do,
is pleasing to all.
We saw the apartments of the Prince Bishop, but found few things worth
remarking, except that in the pictures of Carlo Loti there is a shade of
the Flemish school to be discerned, which was pretty as we are now hard
upon the confines. Our sovereign here keeps his little menagerie in a
mighty elegant style: the animals possess an insulated rock, surrounded
by the Adige, and planted with every thing that can please them best; the
wild, or more properly the predatory creatures, are confined, but in very
spacious apartments; with each a handsome outlet for amusement: while
such as are granivorous rove at pleasure over their domain, to which
their master often comes in summer to eat ice at a banquetting house
erected for him in the middle, whence a prospect of a peculiar nature is
enjoyed; great beauty, much variety, and a very limited horizon, like
some of the views about Bath.
At the death of one prince another is chosen, and government carried on
as at Rome in miniature. We staid here two nights and one day, thought
perpetually of Matlock and Ivy Bridge, and saw some rarities belonging
to a man who shewed us a picture of our Saviour’s circumcision, and told
us it was _San Simeone_, a baby who having gone through many strange
operations and torments among some Jews who stole him from his parents,
as the story goes here at Trent, they murdered him at last, and he became
a saint and a martyr, to whom much devotion is paid at this place, though
I fancy he was never heard of any where else.
The river soon after we left Trent contracted to a rapid and narrow
torrent, such as dashes at the foot of the Alps in Savoy; the rocks
grew more pointed, and the prospects gained in sublimity at every step;
though the neatness of the culture, and quantity of vines, with the
variegated colouring of the woods, continued to excite images more soft
than formidable, less solemn than lovely. The barberry bushes bind
every mountain round the middle as with a scarlet sash, and when we
looked down upon them from a house situated as if in the place which
the Frenchman seemed to have a notion of, when he thought the aerian
travellers were gone _au lieu ou les vents se forment_, they looked
wonderfully pretty. The cleanliness and comfort with which we are now
lodged at every inn, evince our distance from France however, and even
from Italy, where low cielings, clean windows, and warm rooms, are
deemed pernicious to health, and destructive of true delight. Here
however we find ourselves cruelly distressed for want of language, and
must therefore depend on our eyes only, not our ears, for information
concerning the golden house, or more properly the golden roof, long known
to subsist at Inspruck. The story, as well as I can gather it, is this:
That some man was reproached with spending more than he could afford,
till some of his neighbours cried out, “Why he’ll roof his house with
gold soon, but who shall pay the expence?”--“_I_ will;” quoth the piqued
German, and actually did gild his tiles. My heart tells me however,
though my memory will not call up the particulars, that I have heard a
tale very like this before now; but one is always listening to the same
stories I think: At Rome, when they shew a fine head lightly sketched by
Michael Angelo, they inform you how he left it on Raphael’s wall, after
the manner of Apelles and Protogenes; it is called Testa di Ciambellaro,
because he came disguised as a seller of _ciambelle_, or little biscuits,
while Raphael’s scholars were painting at the Farnesini. At Milan, when
they point out to you the extraordinary architecture of the church _detto
il Giardino_, the roof of which is supported by geometrical dependance
of one part upon another, without columns or piers, they tell how the
architect ran away the moment it was finished, for fear its sudden fall
might disgrace him. This tale was very familiar to me, I had heard it
long ago related of a Welch bridge; but it is better only say what is
true.
This is a sweetly situated town, and a rapid stream runs through it as at
Trent; and it is no small comfort to find one’s self once more waited on
by clean looking females, who make your bed, sweep your room, &c. while
the pewters in the little neat kitchens, as one passes through, amaze me
with their brightness, that I feel as if in a new world, it is _so_ long
since I have seen any metal but gold unencrusted by nastiness, and gold
_will_ not be dirty.
The clumsy churches here are more violently crowded with ornaments than
I have found them yet; and for one crucifix or Madonna to be met with on
Italian roads, here are at least forty; an ill carved and worse painted
figure of a bleeding Saviour, large as life, meets one at every turn; and
I feel glad when the odd devotion of the inhabitants hangs a clean shirt
or laced waistcoat over it, or both. Another custom they have wholly new
to me, that of keeping the real skeletons of their old nobles, or saints,
or any one for whom they have peculiar veneration, male or female, in a
large clean glass box or crystal case, placed horizontally, and dressed
in fine scarlet and gold robes, the poor naked skull crowned with a
coronet, and the feet peeping out below the petticoats. These melancholy
objects adorn all their places of worship, being set on brackets by the
wall inside, and remind me strangely of our old ballad of Death and the
Lady;
Fair lady, lay your costly robes aside, &c.
No body ever mentions that Inspruck is subject to fires, and I wonder at
it, as the roofs are all wood cut tile-ways; and heavily pensile, like
our barns in England, for the snow to roll off the easier.
Well! we are far removed indeed from Italian architecture, Italian
sculpture, and Italian manners; but here are twenty-eight old kings, or
keysers, as our German friends call them, large as life, and of good
solid bronze, curiously worked to imitate lace, embroidery, &c. standing
in two rows, very extraordinarily, up one of their churches. I have not
seen more frowning visages or finer dresses for a long time; and here is
a warm feel as one passes by the houses, even in the street, from the
heat of the stoves, which most ingeniously conceal from one’s view that
most cheerful of all sights in cold weather, a good fire. This seems a
very unnecessary device, and the heated porcelain is apt to make one’s
head ache beside; all for the sake of this cunning contrivance, to make
one enjoy the effect of fire without seeing the cause.
The women that run about the town, mean time, take the nearest way to be
warm, wrapping themselves up in cloth clothes, like so many fishermen at
the mouth of the Humber, and wear a sort of rug cap grossly unbecoming.
But too great an attention to convenience disgusts as surely as too
little; and while a Venetian wench apparently seeks only to captivate the
contrary sex, these German girls as plainly proclaim their resolution not
to sacrifice a grain of personal comfort for the pleasure of pleasing all
the men alive.
How truly hateful are extremes of every thing each day’s experience
convinces; from superstition and infidelity, down to the Fribble and the
Brute, one’s heart abhors the folly of reversing wrong to look for right,
which lives only in the middle way; and Solomon, the wisest man of any
age or nation, places the sovereign good in mediocrity of every thing,
moral, political, and religious.
With this good axiom of _nequid nimis_[48] in our mouths and minds, we
should not perhaps have driven so very hard; but a less effort would
have detained us longer from the finest object I almost ever saw; the
sun rising between six and seven o’clock upon the plains of Munich, and
discovering to our soothed sight a lovely champain country, such as
might be called a flat I fear, by those who were not like us accustomed
to a hilly one; but after four-and-twenty hours passed among the Alps,
I feel sincerely rejoiced to quit the clouds and get upon a level with
human creatures, leaving the goats and chamois to delight as they do in
bounding from rock to rock, with an agility that amazes one.
Our weather continuing particularly fine, it was curious to watch one
picturesque beauty changing for another as we drove along; for no sooner
were the rich vineyards and small inclosures left behind, than large
pasture lands filled with feeding or reposing cattle, cows, oxen, horses,
fifty in a field perhaps, presented to our eyes an object they had not
contemplated for two years before, and revived ideas of England, which
had long lain buried under Italian fertility.
Instead of lying down to rest, having heard we had friends at the same
inn, we ran with them to see the picture gallery, more for the sake of
doing again what we had once done before at Paris with the same agreeable
company, than with any hope of entertainment, which however upon trial
was found by no means deficient. Had there been no more than the glow of
colouring which results from the sight of so many Flemish pictures at
once, it must have struck one forcibly; but the murder of the Innocents
by Rubens, a great performance, gave me an opportunity of observing the
different ways by which that great master, Guido Rheni, and Le Brun, lay
hold of the human heart. The difference does not however appear to me
inspired at all by what we term national character; for the inhabitants
of Germany are reckoned slow to anger, and of phlegmatic dispositions,
while a Frenchman is accounted light and airy in his ideas, an Italian
fiery and revengeful. Yet Rubens’s principal figure follows the ruffian
who has seized her child, and with a countenance at once exciting and
expressive of horror, endeavours, and almost arrives at tearing both his
eyes out. One actually sees the fellow struggling between his efforts
to hold the infant fast, and yet rid himself of the mother, while blood
and anguish apparently follow the impression her nails are making in
the tenderest parts of his face. Guido, on the contrary, in one of the
churches at Bologna, exhibits a beautiful young creature of no mean
rank, elegant in her affliction, and lovely in her distress, sitting with
folded arms upon the fore-ground, contemplating the cold corpse of her
murdered baby; his nurse wringing her hands beside them, while crowds of
distracted parents fill the perspective, and the executioners themselves
appear to pay unwilling obedience to their inhuman king, who is seen
animating them himself from the top of a distant tower.--Le Brun mean
time, with more imagination and sublimity than either, makes even brute
animals seem sensible, and shudder at a scene so dreadful; while the very
horses who should bear the cruel prince over the theatre of his crimes,
snort and tremble, and turning away with uncontrollable fury, refuse by
trampling in their blood to violate such injured innocence!--Enough of
this.
The patient German is seen in all they shew us, from the painting of
Brughuel to the music of Haydn. A friend here who speaks good Italian
shewed us a collection of rarities, among which was a picture formed of
butterflies wings; and a set of boxes one within another, till my eyes
were tired with trying to discern, and the patience of my companions was
wearied with counting them, when the number passed seventy-three: this
amusement has at least the grace of novelty to recommend it. I had not
formed to myself an idea of such unmeaning, such tasteless, yet truly
elaborate nicety of workmanship, as may be found in the Elector’s chapel,
where every relic reposes in some frame, enamelled and adorned with a
minuteness of attention and delicacy of manual operation that astonishes.
The prodigious quantity of these gold or ivory figures, finished so as to
require a man’s whole life to each of them, are of immense value in their
way at least, and fill one’s mind with a sort of petty and frivolous
wonder totally unexperienced till now, bringing to one’s recollection
every hour Pope’s famous line--
Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around!
The contrast between this chapel and Cappella Borghese never left my
fancy for a moment: but if the cost of these curious trifles caused my
continued surprise, how was that surprise increased by observing the
bed-chamber of the Elector; where they told us that no less than one
hundred thousand pounds sterling were buried under loads of gold tissue,
red velvet, and old-fashioned carved work, without the merit even of an
attempt towards elegance or taste?
Nimphenbourg palace and gardens reminded me of English gardening forty
years ago, while--
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
I do think I can recollect going with my parents and friends to see Lord
Royston’s seat at Wrest, when we lived in Hertfordshire, in the year
1750; and it was just such a place as Nimphenbourg is at this day. Now
for some just praise: every thing is kept so neat here, so clean, so
sweet, so comfortably nice, that it is a real pleasure somehow either to
go out in this town or stay at home: the public baths are delicious; the
private rooms with boarded floors, all swept, and brushed, and dusted,
that not a cobweb can be seen in Munich, except one kept for a rarity,
with the Virgin and Child worked in it, and wrought to such an unrivalled
pitch of delicate fineness, that till we held it up to the light no
naked eye could discern the figures it contained, till a microscope soon
discovered the skill and patience requisite to its production;--great
pains indeed, and little effect! We have left the country where things
were exactly the reverse,--great effect, and little pains! But it is the
same in every thing.
The women’s scrupulous attention to keep their persons clear from
dirt, makes their faces look doubly fair; their complexions have quite
a lustre upon them, like some of our wenches in the West of England,
whose transparent skins shew, by the motion of the blood beneath, an
illuminated countenance that stands in the place of eye-language,
and betrays the sentiments of the innocent heart with uncontrolable
sincerity. These girls however will not be found to attract or retain
lovers, like an Italian, whose black eyes and white teeth (though their
possessor thinks no more of cleaning the last-named beauty than the
first) tell her mind clearly, and with little pains again produce certain
and strong effect. Our stiff gold-stuff cap here too, as round, as hard,
and as heavy as an old Japan China bason, and not very unlike one, is
by no means favourable to the face, as it is clapped close round the
head, the hair combed all smooth out of sight, and a plaited border of
lace to it made firm with double-sprigged wire; giving its wearer all the
hardness and prim look of a Quaker, without that idea of simplicity which
in their dress compensates for the absence of every ornament.
The gentlemen’s _maniere de s’ajuster_ is to me equally striking: an
old nobleman who takes delight in shewing us the glories of his little
court (where I have a notion he himself holds some honourable office)
came to dine with us yesterday in a dressed coat of fine, clean, white
broad-cloth, laced all down with gold, and lined with crimson sattin, of
which likewise the waistcoat was made, and laced about with a narrower
lace, but pretty broad too; so that I thought I saw the very coat my
father went in to the old king’s birth-day five and thirty years ago.
There is more stateliness too and ceremonious manners in the conversation
of this gentleman, and the friends he introduced us to, than I have
of late been accustomed to; and they fatigue one with long, dry,
uninteresting narratives. The innkeepers are honest, but inflexible; the
servants silent and sullen; the postillions slow and inattentive; and
every thing exhibits the reverse of what we have left behind.
The treasures of this little Elector are prodigious, his jewels superb;
the Electress’s pearls are superior in size and regularity to those
at Loretto, but that distinguished by the name of the “Pearl of the
Palatinate” is surely incomparable, and, as such, always carried to the
election of a new Emperor, when each brings his finest possession in his
hand, like the Princess of Babylon’s wooers,--which was perhaps meant
by Voltaire as a joke upon the custom. This pearl is about the bigness
and shape of a very fine filberd, the upper part or cap of it jet black,
smooth and perfectly beautiful; _it is unique in the known world_.
Our Prince’s dinner here is announced by the sound of drums and trumpets,
and he has always a concert playing while he dines: pomp is at this place
indeed so artfully substituted instead of general consequence, that while
one remains here one scarcely feels aware how little any one but his own
courtiers can be thinking about the Elector of Bavaria; but ceremony is
of most use where there is least importance, and glitter best hides the
want of solidity.
From Munich to Saltzbourg nothing can exceed the beauties of the
country; whole woods, and we may say forests, of ever-green timber, keep
all idea of winter kindly at a distance: the road lies through these
elegantly-varied thickets, which sometimes are formed of cedars, often
of foxtailed pines, while a pale larch sometimes, and gloomy cypress,
hinder the verdure from being too monotonous; here are likewise mingled
among them some oak and beech of a majestic size. Nor do our prospects
want that dignity which mountains alone can bestow; those which separate
Bavaria from Hungary are high, and of considerable extent; a long range
they are of bulky fortifications, behind which I am informed the country
is far coarser than here.
The cathedral at Saltzbourg is modern, built upon the model of St.
Peter’s at Rome, but on a small scale: one now sees how few the defects
are of that astonishing pile, though brought close to one’s eye, by being
stript of the awful magnitude that kept examination at a distance. The
musical bells remind me of those at Bath, and every thing here seems, as
at Bath, the work of this present century; but there is a Benedictine
convent seated on the top of a hill above the town, of exceeding
antiquity, founded before the conquest of England by William the Norman;
under which lie its founder and protectors, the old Dukes of Bavaria;
which they are happy to shew travellers, with the registered account of
their young Prince _Adam_, who came over to our island with William, and
gained a settlement: they were pleased when I proved to them, that his
blood was not yet wholly extinct among us.
A fever hindered us here from looking at the salt-works, from which the
city takes its name: but the water-works at Heelbrun pleased us for a
moment; and I never saw beavers live so happily as with the Archbishop of
Saltzbourg, who suffers, and even encourages, his tame ones to dig, and
build, and amuse themselves their own way: he has fish too which eat out
of his hand, and are not carp, but I do not know what they are; my want
of language distracts me. These German streams appear to us particularly
pellucid, and, by what I can gather from the people, this water never
freezes. The taste of gardening seems just what ours was in England
before Stowe was planned, and they divert you now with puppets moved by
concealed machinery, as I recollect their doing at places round London,
called the Spaniard at Hampstead and Don Saltero’s at Chelsea.
The Prince Archbishop’s income is from three to four hundred thousand a
year I understand, and he spends it among his subjects, who half adore
him. His chief delight is in brute animals they tell me, particularly
horses, which engross so much of his attention that he keeps one hundred
and seventeen for his own private and personal use, of various merits,
beauties, and pedigrees; never surely was so elegant, so capital a
stud! And he is singularly fond of a breed of fine silky-haired English
setting-dogs, red and white, and very high upon their legs.
The country which carried us forward to Vienna is eminently fine, and
fine in a way that is now once more grown new to me; no hedges here, no
small inclosures at all; but rich land, lying like as in Dorsetshire,
divided into arable and pasture grounds, clumped about with woods of
ever-green. Such is the genius of this sovereign for English manners and
English agriculture, that no conversation is said to be more welcome at
his court than what relates to the sports or profits of the field in
Britain; to which accounts he listens with good-humoured earnestness, and
talks of a fine scenting day with the true taste of an English country
gentleman.
On this day I first saw the Danube at Lintz, where, though but just
burst from the spring, it is already so deep and strong that scarcely
any wooden bridge is capable to resist it, and accordingly it did a few
months ago overwhelm many cottages and fields, among which we passed.
The inhabitants here call it _Donaw_ from its swiftness; and it deserves
beside, any name expressive of that singular purity which distinguishes
the German torrents.
The rivers of France, Italy, and England, give one no idea of that
elemental perfection found in the fluids here; not a pebble, not a fish
in these translucent streams, but may be discerned to a depth of twelve
feet. As the water in Germany, so is the atmosphere in Italy, a medium
so little obstructed by vapour I remember, that Vesuvius looked as near
to Naples, from our window, as does lord Lisburne’s park from the little
town of Exmouth opposite, a distance of about five miles I believe, and
the other is near ten. Let me add, that this peculiarity brings every
object forward with a certain degree of hardness not wholly pleasing
to the eye. The prospects round Naples have another fault, resulting
from too great perfection: the sky’s brilliant uniformity, and utter
cloudlessness for many months together, takes away those broad masses of
light and shade, with the volant shadows that cross our British hills,
relieving the sight, and discriminating the landscape.
The scenery round Conway Castle in North Wales, with a thunder-storm
rolling over the mountain; the sea strongly illuminated on one side, with
the sun shining bright upon the verdure on the other; the lights dropping
in patches about one; exhibits a variety, the which to equal will be very
difficult, let us travel as far as we please.
Magnificence of a far different kind however claims our present
attention--a convent and church shewn us at Molcke upon our way,
the residence of eighteen friars who inhabit a stately palace it is
confessed, while three immense courts precede your entrance to a splendid
structure of enormous size, on which the finery bestowed amazed even me,
who came from Rome; nor had entertained an idea of seeing such gilding,
and carving, and profusion of expence, lavished on a place of religious
retirement in our road to