We sauntered back to our hotel, intent upon the objects we had seen, and the memories to which they gave rise. And scarcely had we gulped down our dinner, hastily and almost untasted, than we threw ourselves back in our chair, folded our arms, firmly closed our eyes, to shut out the distracting light (well did Shakespeare call it "garish," when a man has anything to think or dream out), and set about painting, to ourselves— just as it occurred on that ever-memorable day, the ninth of July, 1386 -the battle of Sempach.

We know not, and we would give a good deal to know, how the process of imagination is carried on in the minds of other men; for everybody, we doubt not, imagines just as he thinks and feels, and composes specially and in a way of his own. For ourselves we have never any great difficulty, when we can only get into a corner, out of the reach of troublesome tongues, to call up any particular person, or the scene or acting of some great event. Sometimes they appear to us as in an actual and substantial being

Standing embodied in the senses plain,"

as Thompson exactly expresses it; but much more frequently as though in a picture, without a frame to it, dim in its colours, indistinct in its groups, and that keeps waving and flickering about, so that we cannot, for the life of us, have a fixed and satisfactory view of it. But one thing, often as we have tried at it, we could never accomplish to our satisfaction. We could never throw ourselves, wholly, into some past age, and remain there, wrapt from the present, for half-an-hour together; hear people talking in the language and upon the subjects belonging to that epoch; see them wearing the garb, walking in the streets, and living through the daily routine of life, such as those things then existed; and be ourselves, while the vision lasted, an atom of that generation. We could never, in a word, succeed in putting back the clock of time three or four hundred years, and making it stand still there, as Joshua did the sun, while we took a good look about us, undisturbed by a single tick of it clicking on the ear of imagination. If anybody has ever fully done this, he has kept his pleasure to himself; for no book, we are positive, was ever written, describing—ages afterwards—the manners and the beings of a particular period, that could be believed, for a moment, to have been written in the time which it describes. Shakespeare, the most imaginative of mortals, has never attempted this: among other reasons, we suppose it will be granted, for the want of that knowledge on which such a feat of fancy, if the thing were practicable at all, must needs be based. Between Henry the Fourth and Henry the Eighth elapsed an interval of one hundred and ten years, diversified with infinite changes in the language,

habits, feelings, and civilization of the people whom they governed; but what difference is there, in any of these respects, between the characters in his two plays bearing the names of those Kings? Whether they are Greeks, or Romans, or ancient Britons, Danes of the ninth or Scotchmen of the eleventh century, Italians of the middle ages, or Englishmen of the days of the Plantagenets, his men and women talk the English language as it was spoken in the reign of Elizabeth; and where their opinions and sympathies are not such as are common to all ages, and to the universal family of mankind, they are such as were current in that time-just as much so as the characters of Corneille are all of them Frenchmen of the Grand Monarque; only there are these two essential differences, one of accident and one of genius, between the two writers-that the age of Shakespeare was infinitely more picturesque and poetical than the age of Corneille, and that the characters of the former only very rarely and exceptionally, apart from the question of language, belong to any particular era and nation, while those of the latter appertain, exclusively, to the reign and country in which they were created.

Such a book, need it be said, as that which we are now contemplating, would certainly be written but very infrequently, even if it were possible to write it at all. For, as probably none but a zealous antiquary would have any sympathy with the state of things it might describe, so assuredly none but an antiquary would understand, without a glossary, the dialect in which it was delivered. But we hold the thing to be plainly impossible. We hold it, we say, to be impossible for any man, whatever may be his genius or knowledge, living in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, to write such a novel as "Tom Jones," or “Roderick Random," of the fourteenth or fifteenth century: fictions indeed, but which differ from every later fiction with which we are acquainted in this-that they are exact copies of life and manners; in which there is not a single personage introduced whom we cannot believe to have existed, or an incident that might not have happened, or even a word that might not have been spoken, precisely when and where it occurs. And impossible, upon these grounds that even supposing a man to be possessed of the necessary acquaintance, at once so copious and minute, with the customs and language, and discriminating characteristics of the age, into which he sought to transport himself, it would require not so much an exertion of the most powerful imagination as a trance and perfect temporary separation between the soul and the body, to animate the mass of dry details with the breath of life. It would require, in brief, the combination of a knowledge of antiquity far exceeding the knowledge of Hearne or Grose, or the author of "Queenhoo Hall;" with a genius far exceeding the genius of Shakespeare or of Scott.

No man more admires "Waverley" than we do; or is possessed, we really flatter ourselves, with a keener appreciation of its thousand beauties. We have read it twenty times; and shall, most probably, if we live long enough, read it twenty times more. But we never lay it down without a certain uncomfortable feeling, when we recollect that the action of it and the action of "Tom Jones" are both placed in the same year-1745. What Scottish manners and the Scottish language might be at that time we say nothing, for we are no judges. Very probably they are depicted with perfect fidelity in "Waverley." But if "Tom Jones" be a correct representation of English manners and English phraseology in the middle of the eighteenth century, then surely neither Sir Everard Waverley, nor his sister, nor Colonel Talbot, nor the hero of the book himself, could have possibly belonged to that period-for they would be very little out of place in our own. "Incredulus odi" it would be ridiculous to say of such a book, but "incredulus lego" is true of ourselves.

The same opinion we also entertain of "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth." They are the noblest and finest romances that ever were written; but there ends our praise of them. In truth, Scott upon English ground was very much like Captain Marryatt upon any ground at all-altogether out of his right element. What the sea was to the one, Scotland or, at least, Scottish characters were to the other. Of "Jeanie Deans," or "Richie Moniplies," we can believe every word; but not a word of "Richard " or "Robin Hood," of "Leicester " or "Varney." The bright sun flashing into our room, and falling, not too agreeably, on our face, as we lay in bed, the next morning, awoke us at an early hour. Ingenious Aquinas raises a question whether angels know most at break of day; and resolves it, if we remember right-for we have not the ponderous tome at hand-in the affirmative. We fear, if this be true, our nature is more than ordinarily unspiritual-for we generally awake with a confused head, quite incapable, for some seconds, of thinking clearly, or even at all; unless we should console ourselves with the reflection, that angels cannot be very pure and perfect spirits themselves, whose apprehensions and capacities of knowledge are greater at one time than another, according to the theory of the angelic doctor.

The first thoughts that pierced into our brains, as soon as the haze and clouds had passed away, and took up their posts there, one after another, were as follows:-the day is apparently a very beautiful one; the distance, at the farthest, does not exceed eight miles; the road thither is one that we have never travelled; and our legs, so long upon furlough and released from their daily duty, owe us a long arrear of exertion. Why should we not, we that have made a pilgrimage to almost every other battle-field in Europe-from grey Marathon to heathy Culloden-why

should we not pay the compliment of a visit to this one of Sempach, at least as worthy of it as any of them, and now so conveniently near?

It was a saying of a certain philosopher, who was also a very sensible person, that to think deliberately and to execute promptly are the signs of a wise and brave man. Bearing this maxim in memory, and desirous to merit both its praises, we sprang out of bed, without farther delay, as soon as we had made up our minds to go there; and in half-an-hour were on our road to Sempach. By the roaring Emmen, with its luteolent waters, of a mixed colour between mud and milk, keeping for a mile or two, and then along a pleasant road enough-with a fertile valley upon either side of us, and great Pilate directly in our rear, to reward our fatigue with a glorious view for the mere trouble of turning round our head-we arrived in a couple of hours at the neat and lively village of Neuenkirch. Here, following the directions of our pocket-map, we turned off to the right hand. Our way now lay through some rich meadows, by the side of a vagabond little brook, that went wandering tortuously about the country, making all sorts of unnecessary deflections, enough to drive a railway contractor mad to look at, as though time were not of the least consequence to it, or it could not determine which way to run

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Atque Arar impetuus, dubitans quò vertere cursus."

This foot-path, in a short while-even including sundry minutes spent in turning aside to each cowslip-covered knoll that tempted us with a better prospect than ordinary, or in peeping into many a deep pool, beneath the roots of some undermined tree, and speculating whether a trout was lying there-brought us into a bye-road leading to the town of Sursee. To the left of it, a hundred yards off, flowed the Lake of Sempach. On its right hand, bordering upon it, scarcely a quarter of a league ahead of us, lay the immortal village.

The lake in the fourteenth century, and, probably, for many an age afterwards, flowed immediately under the walls. A strip of meadow, rank and rushy, yet wanting only to be drained-an art, apparently, unknown in Switzerland-to make it as fertile land as any in Christendom, now lies between them. But the village itself, save in the partial decay of its old castle and the neglected condition of its ramparts, is exactly the same, we have very little doubt, as it was five hundred years ago. There is not, we should say, judging from their appearance, a single house in the place of which some part, at least, was not in existence at the time of the battle. Like Willisau and other old towns in the canton, unknown to fame and the guide-book, it consists of a single narrow street, stoneflagged within and stone-walled without, with a rude archway at either end of it, and wanting only a roof to convert it into a large parallelogram

mic prison-suggesting the strangest notions in the world of the sort of life which a man must lead who passes all his days there.

We spent a long and happy morning-or afternoon we should rather call it, for they dine, in this part of the world, universally at eleven o'clock-in roaming about the extensive slopes, immediately behind the village, on which the battle was fought. It required but very little fancy to picture to ourselves every incident of the day, just as it took place and on the identical spot: the sidelong advance of the Austrians; the charge of the Swiss, fourteen hundred only in number; the long struggle; the death of Winkelried; the breaking of the ranks; the headlong flight down the hill and along the banks of the lake, and the death of hundreds beneath its waters. For here, neither the progress of agriculture, nor the increase of population, nor any of those innumerable obscure causes that are constantly changing the face of a country elsewhere-so that a man who died fifty years ago would have the greatest difficulty, in most places, were he to come to life again, in recognizing his own fields and the very street he had passed all his days in-had been in operation. No paltry Enclosure-act, pernicious alike to two very excellent things-hunting and the picturesque, had cabined and cribbed-in the wide landscape: here a green field, there a ploughed one, like the square of a chess-board. Not a house or a barn broke the prospect. A small chapel, almost hidden by a clump of trees, and the brown crops ripening in the sun, were the only objects in front of us, as we stood with our back to Sempach, that could have suggested the labours or very existence of mankind. Vast, silent, solitary, and teeming with glorious recollections of the past, it was exactly a scene suited to our tastes and affections. We shall be able, we are confident, as long as we live, to depict it upon the retina of our minds; to take it down, at pleasure, from its nail in that gallery where it will hang, henceforth, in company with the choicest treasures of our memory— "Non evellendus vi vel ratione medullis,"

as Cowley prettily says of the love of poetry.*

The sun was sloping fast to the west when we quitted the memorable field. We turned our steps towards the village, and entering its silent

*In his Epistle to Vane: verses written with such case and elegance, that if any man now living were to write as good ones, we should be tempted to wish he would confine himself to the Latin tongue. Mr. Macaulay is not only of opinion that the Latin diction of Cowley is inferior to that of Milton, but confidently assures us that Dr. Johnson-who, in common with the elder Warton, and every other scholar, thought very differently-was not qualified to form a judgment on the subject! This is one of those many pieces of superciliousness- -we can give it no milder name-which he would do well, when he collects his works, to run his pen through.