quite confused. Pardon, my dear sir, my seeming delay in answering your letter. I wrote instantly, but my silly letter is literally poste restante in Naples. I hope these lines will reach you safely, and convince Mrs. Hall and you how unfeignedly happy I shall be to see you and your little darlings. It will indeed be most gratifying to me if you will allow the infants to repose here for a few weeks, and find in Hainfeld the quiet of home. Your excellent Scotch nursery-maid will revive me with letting me hear once more the language of my heart. She shall arrange all here exactly as she wishes, and, I trust, make the dear children comfortable. The house is very large; there are thirty-nine rooms on this floor. Not only your family, but any friends you choose to bring along with you, can find place enough. The country is truly healthy; the soil rich and well cultivated, and the hills and distant mountains covered with forests. The people resemble their oxen-they are diligent and docile. There are few neighbours, except in Hungary (three hours' distance from this); and Hungary is a country little known and deserving your attention. Styria is also a country little known, owing to the singular fancy or fashion of the English always to fly between Vienna and Italy, by the way of Tyrol. Kotzebue says, "The English carry their prejudices, as they do their tea-kettles, all over the world with them." This, in general, is merely an impertinence; but in what respects the Tyrol road, it holds true; our road is in many respects preferable.

You inquire as to the state of the roads. They are excellent. The Eilwagen, a kind of diligence, takes regularly fifty-five hours between Trieste and Gratz, and twenty-five hours between Gratz and Vienna. As man and beast in Austria move discreetly, this, with the aid of your post-map, will show you the true state of the roads.

The tenure of property in this country is very different from the English; and I would fain, were it possible, excite your curiosity as to Styria. The constitution of the American States interested you. Why should not ours do so? The country is divided into circles; mine contains 4200 souls. My bailiff collects all the taxes within the circle; manages the conscription; the police; the criminal justice in the first instance; the property of minors, &c. &c. He must have passed his trials as an advocate, and I must pay him and his assistants, or what is called my chancery. I defy the public affairs, in as far as this goes, to cost less to a government. The said bailiff also collects the dominical, or what is due to me, and manages the landed property, which, as we have no farming, is kept, according to the Scotch phrase, in our own hands. The first crop of hay was housed yesterday, so if you travel with your own horses, good food is ready for them. After the wheat and rye are cut down, buck-wheat is sown, which can ripen even under the snow. It is the food of the peasantry, as oatmeal was formerly of the Scotch Highlanders; but the crop from the best ground is sold off to pay the very high taxes. The people are good and docile. The noblesse, owing to the dreadful war, &c., are mostly on short commons. We have no poor, which, owing to the question in England respecting the poor-laws, is deserving of being noticed. No man is allowed to

VOL. LVII, NO, CXIII.

I

marry

marry till he can prove he is able to maintain a wife and children; and this, with the law of celibacy of the clergy, and the caution* required of the military-almost an act of celibacy-are checks on population which would make the hearts of Mr. Malthus and Miss Martineau burn within them for admiration. The result is, the entire demoralizing of the people. The mask of religion helps nothing. At the last grand jubilee, in the next parish, seventy-two pairs of virgins adorned the procession, dressed in white, and covered with garlands of flowers. In eight months forty-four of them were in the family way. Madame Nature is not a political economist, and she does not let her laws be outraged with impunity.'-p. 13.

I must warn you about the custom-houses-they are one of our plagues. The money you need on the road are pieces of twenty kreutzers, with what is called good and bad paper money. Ten florins good make twenty-five bad. In all Germany the English are considered as fair game, particularly in the inns. Our innkeepers do not dispute, like the Italians, for the character of the people is reserved; and they will not come down a farthing in their bills. It is marked on your map whether the stages are single or double posts, and I have always seen the driver paid as one horse; but unless they are contented, they drive slowly, and the loss of time and the expense of the inns is more than the difference. If you will have the goodness to write me a line on arriving at Trieste, the horses shall be sent to Gratz to wait for you.

'Hainfeld is about six hours from Gratz. Your sweet infants will be sadly disappointed when, instead of a splendid dwelling, they see a building like a manufactory; the grounds in culture to the door, and the cows lodged within a gunshot of their bed-chamber. At first they will be afraid of me, for I am now like nothing they ever saw, except the picture of Mademoiselle Endor in an old family Bible. Alas! the ravages of time are equally visible on its possessor, and upon poor desolate Hainfeld! Farewell.'-pp. 25, 26.

The Countess's sketch did no great injustice to the appearance of the Schloss or its mistress. The edifice turned out to be, in truth, more like a manufactory than a castle, and she herself was no bad representative of a witch. She was about seventy-four or seventy-five years old-had been for above three years completely bed-ridden-was in constant suffering from a complication of diseases-and had mourned for the successive losses of her husband and her only son with a constancy which seems to have in some degree disturbed her reason; but amidst this complication of malady and misfortune, her mind had preserved (excepting those eccentricities to which we have alluded) all the cheerfulness, vigour, and originality for which she had been in her early days remarkable and remarked.

"No officer of the Austrian army is allowed to marry unless he previously deposits a sum of money in the hands of Government for the maintenance of his widow and children in the event of his death. The sum varies with the rank of the officer."-B. H.

Jane

Jane Anne Cranstoun was born, Captain Hall tells us, about 1760, the second daughter of the Honourable George Cranstoun, younger son of the fifth Lord Cranstoun, by a daughter of the Marquis of Lothian. Her younger sister married, in 1790, Professor Dugald Stewart, and it was probably through this connexion that she came acquainted with Godfrey Wenceslaus, Count of Purgstall, of a great and wealthy house in Austria, then, we believe, one of Professor Stewart's pupils, whom she married in 1797. Miss Cranstoun was, as we hinted, very lively and agreeable, and became an early friend of Walter Scott, also a pupil of her brother-in-law. Captain Hall says that young Scott derived much advantage in his early literary attempts from her critical advice and encouragement; and some fruitless aid in a love-affair, which failed, in spite of Miss Cranstoun's sympathy and assistance.' Captain Hall surmises, but, in our opinion, without sufficient grounds, that Miss Cranstoun was the prototype of Sir Walter's Diana Vernon. We altogether dissent from this conjecture. Miss Cranstoun was at least eleven years older than Sir Walter-and, at the period when he could have been intimate with her, she must have lost much of the bloom and freshness which are essential to the idea of Diana Vernon. It may be also inferred that her personal charms were not equal to her mental endowments, from the circumstance of her having reached her thirty-seventh year in single blessedness; and finally, the scenes in which she and Scott must generally, and perhaps could only have met-a college tutor's family circle in the city of Edinburgh-could have little analogy to those in which he placed his rural heroine. Be that as it may, Miss Cranstoun became, in 1797, Countess of Purgstall, and proceeded with her husband to his extensive estates in Lower Styria, whence she never returned. The Count died in 1811, and their only child, a son, a few years after, at the age of nineteen; and she seems to have cherished for their memory an almost morbid sensibility:

'No sooner was the son gone, than upwards of seventy claimants as heirs-at-law pounced on the noble estates of the ancient family of Purgstall, and the poor desolate widow had enough to do to establish her right even to that portion of the property which had been settled upon her. The difficulties she encountered in arranging these matters, and the severe distress to which she was reduced by innumerable and apparently interminable law-suits, might have broken the spirit and wearied out the resolution of a less vigorous mind. With all her fortitude, indeed, she seems to have been almost subdued; and but for the generous assistance of the late Lord Ashburton, a near connexion of hers [he had married her niece], she must in all probability have sunk under the joint weight of poverty and law proceedings.

She was now, by these successive bereavements, left quite alone in a foreign

I 2

a foreign land; and having lost every being who was dear to her, she appears to have had scarcely any other object whilst she remained in the world, but to cherish the remembrance of those who were gone-to feed her grief, in short, rather than to overcome it. In this spirit, accordingly, she permitted nothing to be changed in the castle. Every article of furniture stood exactly in its old place-not a walk amongst the grounds was altered-not a tree cut down-not a book shifted in the library. So that the castle of Hainfeld and all its old inmates, all its old usages, went on, or rather went not on, but remained as if arrested by the frost of its mistress's grief, in the very position they occupied at the period of that last and crowning disaster, her son's death, which obliterated the house of Purgstall.

'In former times, we were told, the Countess had been the gayest of the gay, and the most active person in the country, both in body and mind. But she soon sunk into a state of inactivity; and by considering it a kind of duty to those she had lost, to make the worst of things, instead of making the best of them, she greatly aggravated the hopeless and forlorn nature of her situation. One of the effects of this indiscreet course of mental discipline was to undermine a constitution naturally robust; and presently, in addition to her other misfortunes, gout, rheumatism, and tic douloureux, with other inward and painful complaints, took their turns to torment her. Amongst the strange fancies which formed part of her singularly constituted mind, was a firm persuasion that all medical assistance was useless in her case, and indeed, in most cases; and thus, unquestionably, she allowed some of the diseases which preyed upon her to acquire a much greater head than they might have done had they been treated "secundum artem." Be this as it may, she presented to the eye a miserable spectacle of bodily suffering and bodily decay; but these were probably rendered more conspicuous from the undiminished vigour of her intellects-the freshness and even vivacity of her disposition-the uniform suavity of her temper, and the lively interest which, in spite of herself, as it should seem, and her resolution to be unhappy, she continued to take in the concerns of the external world.

'I should have mentioned, that at the time we first saw the Countess she had been confined to bed three whole years-to the very bed on which her son had expired seventeen years before; and from which, as she said with too much appearance of truth, she herself could never hope to rise again. Fortunately, her complaints had not attacked her eyes nor her hands, so that she could both read and write. Neither was she in the least deaf, and her powers of speech were perfect-that is to say, her articulation was perfect, for as to her language, it was made up of a strange confusion of tongues. The most obvious and predominant of all was good honest Scotch, or rather classical English with a strong Scotch accent. Along with this was mixed a certain portion of German, chiefly in idiom, but often in actual words, so that we were at first occasionally puzzled to know what the good old lady would be at. Her French was a singular compound of all these dialects. But in whatever language she spoke, her ideas were always so clear, and so well arranged, and

her

her choice of words, however mispronounced, so accurate, that after we had learned the cause of the seeming confusion, we never failed to understand her.'-pp. 36-39.

The following more detailed picture of the Countess and the castle will increase the interest which, we assure ourselves, the foregoing extract must excite.

'In one of her letters, she said she was like nothing in the world but a mummy,-adding, "for the last three weeks, a very sick one;" and truth bids me avow that our excellent hostess did not look the character amiss. . .

'We found our aged friend as we had been told to expect, in a huge antiquated bed, with faded damask curtains, in a room feebly lighted, and furnished in the style of a hundred years ago. Her wasted form was supported by half a dozen pillows of different shapes and sizes, and everything about her wore the appearance of weakness and paineverything, I should say, except her voice, expression of countenance, and manners, in none of which could be traced any symptom of decay or weakness. Still less might any feebleness be detected in what she said, for nothing in the world could be more animated or more cordial than her welcome. She shook hands with each of us, as if she had known us all our lives, and expressed over and over again her joy at having succeeded in bringing us to her castle.

"You must be sadly tired, however," she said, "and the children must be almost ready for their beds, so pray show that you feel at home by selecting the rooms which suit you best. There are enough of them, I trust; and presently, the dinner which has been ready for you an hour or two will be served up."

'Off we set, under charge of the major-domo, Joseph, who, in obedience to the magnificent orders of his hospitable mistress, had lighted the stoves in three times the number of apartments we could by possibility occupy, in order, as he said, that we might pick and choose. In most old castles which I have seen, the rooms are small and comfortless, but in Hainfeld they were large and commodious; and though the furniture was not abundant, or at least not so superabundant as in modern mansions, it was all good and even elegant in its old-fashioned heavy way.

In the principal room, which had been prepared for us, and which was the best in the castle, there stood, in rather tottering condition, a handsomely got up bed, at least eight feet wide, furnished with crimson silk curtains, bordered with silver lace two or three inches broad, surmounted by a massy carved cornice, fringed with silver tracery, in the same taste as a rich but heavy embroidery which figured at the head of the bed. In like manner the walls were hung with crimson satin; and round the room were placed old-fashioned sofas with curling backs, and arms like dolphins' tails, embossed in gold, and all padded with elastic. cushions wrought in flowers. Fancifully carved writing tables, supported by not less fantastically shaped legs, with snug places for the feet to rest upon, stocd here and there. Bureaus, chests of drawers,

and