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.
St. Michael’s figure is incomparable; those of Moses and St. Peter
happily imagined; the spirit of composition, the manner of grouping and
colouring, the general effect of the whole, prodigious! I know not why
he has so fallen below himself in the Madonna’s character; perhaps not
imitating Tintoret’s lovely Virgin in Paradise, he has done worse for
fear of being servile. Tintoret’s idea of her is so _very_ poetical!
but those who shewed it me at Venice said the drawing was borrowed from
Guariento, I remember.
Who however except Rubens would have thought so justly, so liberally,
so wisely, about the Negro drawn up to heaven by the angels? who still
retains the old terrestrial character, so far as to shew a disposition
to laugh at _their_ situation who on earth tormented him. When all is
said, every body knows very well that Michael Angelo’s picture on this
subject is by far the finest; and that neither Rubens nor Tintoret
ever pretended, or even hoped to be thought as great artists as he:
but though Dante is a sublimer poet than Tasso, and Milton a writer of
more eminence than Pope, _these_ last will have readers, reciters, and
quoters, while the others must sit down contented with silent veneration
and acknowledged superiority.
This day we saw the Rhine--what rivers these are! and what enormous
inhabitants they do contain! a brace of bream, and eels of a magnitude
and flavour very uncommon except in Germany, were our supper here. But
the manners begin I see to fade away upon the borders; our soft feather
beds are left behind; men too, sometimes sad, nasty, ill-looked fellows,
come in one’s room to sweep, &c. and light the fire in the stove, which
is now always made of lead, and the fumes are very offensive; no more
tight maids to be seen: but we shall get good roads; at Liege, down in a
dirty coal pit, the bad ones end I think; and that town may be said to
finish all our difficulties. After passing through our last disagreeable
resting-place then, one finds the manners take a tint of France, and
begins to see again what one has often seen before. The forests too are
fairly left behind, but neat agriculture, and comfortable cottages more
than supply their loss. Broom, juniper, every English shrub, announce
our proximity to Great Britain, while pots of mazerion in flower at the
windows shew that we are arrived in a country where spring is welcomed
with ceremony, as well as received with delight. The forwardness of the
season is indeed surprising; though it freezes at night now and then,
the general feel of the air is very mild; willows already give signs of
resuscitation, while flights of yellowhammers, a bird never observed in
Italy I think, enliven the fields, and look as if they expected food and
felicity to be near.
Louvaine would have been a place well worth stopping at, they tell me;
but we were in haste to finish our journey and arrive at