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THE

REVIEW.

MONTHLY

JANUARY, 1833.

ART. I.-Semi-Serious Observations of an Italian Exile, during his Residence in England. By COUNT PECCHIO. 1 Vol. 8vo. London: E. Wilson. 1833.

COUNT PECCHIO, the author of this volume, possesses one considerable advantage at least over the writer of the Tour of a German Prince, inasmuch as he has a local habitation, and a name. The Count, it seems, has already attracted the attention of the British public, by some letters, and a journal published by him on the recent political condition of Spain. In one of the periodicals of London, we remember reading, a few years since, with no small degree of entertainment, his narrative of a tour in Greece. A native of the north of Italy, he engaged in the late well known enterprize of the Piedmontese, to assert their common right to political freedom. The attempt having proved unsuccessful, the Count was under the necessity of fleeing from the country of his birth. His first destination was England, the chosen asylum of the unfortunate brave of every land; but the climate having been found uncongenial to his constitution, he migrated to Spain, where, after he had made a short sojourn, his principles proved to be just as obnoxious to the peninsular government, as his bodily frame had been to the atmosphere of Britain. The effect was the same in both instances: the Count was obliged to withdraw from the dominions of Ferdinand; he proceeded next to Greece, and, finally, returned to this country, where a happy matrimonial alliance, and a judiciously selected residence in Brighton, seem wonderfully to succeed in reconciling the wanderer to our climate. Count Pecchio's observations on the character and manners of the people of England are, most creditably for the author, altogether distinguished from the general mass of those publications to which the visits of literary foreigners amongst us have too often given rise VOL. IV. NO. 1. (1833.)

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He is not to be numbered amongst those unprincipled adventurers from the continent, who, having by fraud or intrigue insinuated themselves into the best society of Englishmen, subsequently employed the opportunities afforded to them of casting ridicule upon the country. Neither is he a slave to the system of national and social conduct in which he was educated, nor is he intolerant of those principles of action and of intercourse which do not happen to be sanctioned by his own practice. Count Pecchio is a philosopher from experience; he has lived in the world, and thoroughly estimated the small difference which local distinctions create between man and man; he has learned to be indulgent to those faults which habit and prejudice so easily produce, and has looked upon mankind with that spirit of impartiality which has taught him the injustice of setting up himself, or what belongs to him, as the standard by which the rest of his fellow-creatures are to be compared. A strain of good sense runs through every page of this volume, and though the Count has to contemplate, on many occasions, a scene which is highly calculated to surprize him, on account of its being so much at variance with all his former conclusions, still he never loses sight of the necessity of yielding to every people the right of instituting and perpetuating for themselves, a course of conduct in the various departments of life, such as seems most agreeable to their dispositions. Whilst the Count forbears from blaming even the most eggregious of our deviations, from what he must secretly consider as the criterion of national duty, he does not the less abstain from noting such peculiarities in our social habits, as cause the chief distinction between us and those people with whom he is most acquainted. Thus, for example, we never could have supposed, if we had not the authority of the Count for the belief, that the mid-day population of London perfectly astonished him by the imperturbable silence which they preserved whilst perambulating, in countless multitudes, the streets of this metropolis.

London, he tells us, appeared to him, as he first entered it by the Dovor road, to have been a burnt city, the remnant of some terrible conflagration; so that between the silence on the one hand, of so many thousands who were, nevertheless, all in motion, resembling so many Chinese shades in a theatre; and on the other, the wearisome uniformity of the houses, which were all erected in the same style, like a city of the beavers, Count Pecchio penetrated the city of London, with all the unpleasant sensations of gloomy wonder. But, as the writer chooses to appeal to facts, it is only justice that we should give our attention to the state

ment:

The houses are small and fragile. The first night I spent in a lodginghouse, I seemed to myself still on board the vessel; the walls were equally slender, and, in great part, of wood, the chambers small, and the staircase like a companion ladder; the walls are generally so thin, that they allow

the passage of sounds without interruption. The lodgers would hear one another talking, but that they are accustomed to speak in an under tone. I could hear the murmur of the conversation of my neighbour overhead,— my zenith, as well as that of the other neighbour beneath my feet, like the opposite point Nadir: and I distinguished, at intervals, the words," Very fine weather, indeed-very fine-comfort-comfortable-great comfort" -words which occur as often in their conversation, as stops and commas in a book. In a word, the houses are ventriloquous. As I said before, they are all uniform. In a three-story house, there are three bed-rooms, one over the other, and three parlours in the same situation, so that the population is as it were warehoused in layers like merchandise-like the cheese in the storehouses at Lodi and Codogno. The English have not chosen without design this (I will venture to call it) naval architecture. The advantages they derive from living in houses of small size and little durability are these in general, a house is only built for 99 years, if it outlive this term, it belongs to the proprietor of the ground on which it is built. It seldom happens, therefore, that they attain to any great longevity; on the contrary, they sometimes tumble to pieces before the natural period of their existence. The English, who are better arithmeticians than architects, have discovered, that, by building in this slippery manner, they consume less capital, and that consequently the annual interest and the annual loss of principal are proportionately less. There is another advantage: by this method, posterity is not hampered or tyrannised over. Every generation can choose and build its own houses, according to its own caprices, and its own necessities; and, although in a great measure composed of wood, all the houses are as it were incombustible, by means of the insurance companies, which guarantee the value of the house, the furniture, and every thing else. A fire is no misfortune, but merely a temporary inconvenience to the inmates; a something to look at for the passengers, and an entertaining paragraph for the newspapers. To an Englishman, his house is his Gibraltar; he must not only be inviolable, but absolute, without dispute or fuss. He prefers living in a shell like an oyster, to living in a palace with all the annoyance of a hen-roost. Independence is the vital air of the Englishman. Hence as soon as a son is married, he leaves home, and like the polypi, which when cut in pieces make so many polypi more, goes to evolve elsewhere another family. Numerous and patriarchal families belong to agricultural communities. Among commercial nations, which have factories and colonies in all parts of the globe, when the son has received a suitable education, he abandons the parental nest, and like the birds, goes elsewhere to build one for himself.'-pp. 29–33.

The Count then traces this love of independence still. further into the interior of society; he instances the separations of pews in churches for distinct families, and the walls or palings which inclose the meanest habitations in the most insignificant villages. The English system of fragile houses, justified, as it seems to be, by so many beneficial consequences, is yet exposed to a very serious objection, for the Count very explicitly declares, that we have no claim to the character of good dancers, since the houses are so weak and small, that if one of us attempt to cut a caper on the third story, we run the risk of thundering like a bombshell down

into the kitchen. Again, demands the Count, why do the English gesticulate so little, and bear their arms as if they were glued to the sides; why is this, indeed, answers the ready Count, but because the rooms are so small, as to prevent the possibility of such a free motion without danger to the performer, or some one in his immediate vicinity! This speculation of the Count, however, is subsequently outdone by the arithmetical exaggeration of which he is guilty, in speaking of the London crowds. The torrent of human beings, of horses, carts and carriages, which pass along the streets, from the Strand to the Exchange, he declares, is so dense, as to elevate the thermometer to an indication of a temperature which is full two degrees beyond that of the west end atmosphere !

The author bears witness to the existence of an inviolable order, and a scrupulous division of time in the management of every concern in England. There are clocks and watches, he observes, every where, even on the steeples; we are a nation working to the stroke of the clock, as an orchestra plays to the signal of the leader, and so ingenious are our contrivances for noting the lapse of time, that in some machines, a certain number of revolutions of a wheel are marked by the sound of a bell for the convenience of the workmen. Nay, what is more surprizing, a similar apparatus is attached to the treadmill, lest the culprits who are employed upon it should be cheated out of one moment's additional labour.

Like every foreigner who remains on a visit with us for the term of a week, Count Pecchio experienced all the mournful influence of an English Sunday. The country, all life and agitation for the whole of the six days, seems, he says, to be struck with a periodical apoplexy on the seventh. Whatever may be said in justi fication of our present mode of spending the Sabbath day, it must certainly be admitted, that by foreigners who do not sympathise with us in religion, the return of the Sunday is regarded with disgust. The description, however, given by the author of the pastimes to which the humbler classes have recourse on the Sunday evenings, is undoubtedly correct, and would seem to justify a sentence of censure, if it were only on account of the inconsistency with avowed principles which such indulgence involves. The Count visited the principal tea gardens round London, and saw with surprise that the company talked merely in an under tone, and gave up the chief portion of their evening to smoking. In contemplating the groups of mechanics which were assembled at those places of refreshment, he was struck with the pallid faces, and the weak unsteady frames which characterize their persons. His conclusion is, that whilst the spade improves a population, the loom spoils it. A minute inquiry into the condition of the country will amply bear out the justice of this observation, and it is one which deserves, and must, sooner or later, obtain the fixed attention of the govern

ment. From the general consideration of the state of the manufacturing classes, Count Pecchio transfers his inquiry to another, and not less interesting class, that of the sailors, who inhabit the narrow by-streets near London Bridge, leading to the Thames, and who, like other amphibious creatures, when sojourning on land, keep as close to the fluid element as they can :

• One day I took it into my head to walk into one of the numerous public houses which stand in these alleys, to see what metamorphoses those silent and serious beings undergo on land, in whose company I had, at various times, spent eight months on shipboard. How changed did I find friend Jack* from what I had seen him at sca! No longer serious, no longer quiet, no longer silent; but joyous, noisy, and singing; the room on the ground floor, into which I entered, was involved in a thick cloud of tobacco smoke, which almost hindered me, at first, from distinguishing the dramatis persone. I had not yet taken my seat when one of them, with a gait anything but steady, and reeling like a ship in a storm, with a face the colour of mahogany, from the effect of the tobacco and liquors, offered me some of his 'grog;' that is, brandy mixed with water without sugar,which is the nectar of these heroes of the deep. I accepted it without hesitation, but the pewter pot, from which my generous friend had been drinking, was empty, and the poor fellow had not perceived it. It had, in fact, so completely slipped his memory that he had already tossed off all this ambrosia, that he made a similar offer to everybody that came in. He did not on that account lose his credit with me, because I know that sailors, who are hearts of oak when they are at sea, are hearts of butter when at a tavern, and generous as Cæsar himself. The cheeks of the English sailor are not those sleek and florid cheeks which the climate naturally produces, nor are they of a tall and bulky make, like farmers of the island. Their faces are bronzed, or, to express it better with one of those enviable English epithets composed of two words braced together, they are weatherbeaten. They are in general of the middle height, but large across the shoulders; their limbs clean made and sinewy, and all their movements free and unconstrained. When they are walking, you observe in them a confidence in their own strength, and the audacity of a health proof against every thing. They traverse the streets with an indifference which is natural to them, as if cities were not made for them, or as if they were people who had seen things more wonderful than a city. Their large trowsers, their open jacket and shirt collar, their round hat, or plaid bonnet, all their dress, in fine, contributes to make them appear more active, more free and easy. It is well known that they never wear boots, because they use hands and feet indifferently; they are four-handed or four-footed just as they will. Their eyes are not sparkling, but they are intrepid, and express very well the heart of oak in their breasts. Their countenance generally denotes intelligence; frankness and generosity are stamped on it; one would say, that none of these faces had ever told a lie.

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In a corner of the room there was a group of these mariners, who were singing one of their sea-songs, with the burden "Haul away, yeo ho, boys!" the cry with which they accompany any exertion made in concert.

* A nickname by which the sailors generally call one another.'

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