15 FEBRUARY 1851, Page 18

COLLINS'S RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS. * TILTS volume contains an account of

a pedestrian tourbylir. Collins in Cornwall, a county to which railways have not yet pene- trated. Leaving Plymouth behind him, the author, and his artist friend Mr. Brandling, threaded the county from St. Germains to the Lizard and the Land's-End; visiting the most remarkable places, whether of art or nature, and whether the natural attrac- tions were of the quietly beautiful, the desolate, or the magnificent kind. Mr. Collins, as a pedestrian, was of necessity thrown much among the people ; and he has picked up many traits of their cha- racter, as well as some curious traditions. There are also matters of a more utilitarian cast, but popularly treated,—as a mine, the pilchard fishery, an economical survey of the condition of the poor.

The county of Cornwall is not quite so new to books as Mr. Collins seems to suppose. Mr. Murray included it lately in one of his guides, and there have been many incidental notices of portions of the county ; though hitherto there may not have been so complete an account of Cornwall if we except the "County History," and nothing done in the same way. That way, however, is not alto- gether of the best in some parts. At starting, Mr. Collins falls into the wordmongering and " dead-lively " style of the magazine litt6ra- teur. In a " Start " of forced vivaciousness, he gives a most ex- aggerated account of the ideas entertained about Cornwall as a terra incognita,—comparing it to Kamtschatka ; and when started, he is not a great deal better with a minute account of trifling cir- cumstances sometimes elaborated into tediousness,—as the troubles of bad inns and panegyrics upon good ones ; verbose sketches of " characters " that have no character at all in the description ; ac- counts of adventures through bad roads or wet weather ; with com- monplace stories of saints and similar book lore. As the traveller gets into the heart of the country and among the wonders with which Cornwall really abounds, the interest of the book and the manner of the writer improve. The singular sea-lying lake of Loo, the rocky coast about Lizard Point, the scenery and asso- ciations of the Land's-End, with the social and economical sub-

'Rambles Beyond Railways; or Notes in Cornwall, taken afoot. By W. Wilkie Collins, Author of the "Life of William Collins, B.A.," " Autonina," 8rc. lisc. With illustrations by Henry C. Branding. Publishea by Bentley. jects, have matter which does not suffer in the telling. " St. Michael's Mount" is a survey of its history, after the hacknied mode, but cleverly done. The Ancient and the Modern Drama in Cornwall are also clever, but partake more of the article than of the chapter in a book. _Rambles Beyond Railways contains some clever sketches of Cornwall, and will furnish useful hints and something more to those who intend making a tour thither ; but until the work is unsparingly pruned of its weaknesses and verbo- sities, it will add nothing to the reputation of Mr. Collins.

As an example of the descriptive part of the book, we may take a bit of the descent into Botallack mine.

"We are now four hundred yards out under the bottom of the sea, and twenty fathoms or a hundred and twenty feet below the sea level. Coast- trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty feet beneath us nun are at work ; and there are galleries deeper yet even below that. The extraordinary position down the face of the cliff, of the engines and other works on the surface at Botallack, is now explained. The mine is not excavated like other mines under the laud, but under the sea.

"Having communicated these particulars, the miner next tells us to keep strict silence and listen. We obey him, sitting speechless and motionless. If the reader could only have beheld us now, dressed in our copper-coloured garments, huddled close together in a mere cleft of subterranean rock, with flame burning on our heads and darkness enveloping our limbs, he must certainly have imagined, without any violent stretch of fancy, that he was looking down upon a conclave of gnomes. "After listening for a few moments, a distant unearthly noise becomes faintly audible,—a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is felt on the car as well as heard by it ; a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height ; a sound unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground in the free air of heaven ; a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and impressive when list- ened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinc- tively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communi- cating to each other the strange awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us both from the very first. "At last the miner speaks again, and tells us that what we hear is the sound of the surf lashing the rocks a hundred and twenty feet above us, and of the waves that are breaking on the beach beyond. The tide is now at the flow, and the sea is in no extraordinary state of agitation ; so the sound is low and distant just at this period. But when storms are at their height, e-hen the ocean hurls mountain after mountain of water on the cliffs, thea the noise is terrific ; the roaring heard down here in the mine is so inex- pressibly fierce and awful that the boldest men at work are afraid to con- tinue their labour ; all ascend to the surface to breathe the upper air and stand on the firm earth; dreading, though no such catastrophe has ever happened yet, that the sea will break in on them if they remain in the ca- verns below.

"Hearing this, we get up to look at the rock above us. We are able to stand upright in the position we now occupy ; and, flaring our candles hither and thither in the darkness, can see the bright pure copper streaking the dark ceiling of the gallery in every direction. Lumps of ooze, of the most lustrous green colour, traversed by a natural network of thin red veins of iron, appear here and there in large irregular patches, over which water is dripping slowly and incessantly in certain places. This is the salt water percolating through invisible crannies in the rock. On stormy days it spirts out furiously in thin continuous streams. Just over our heads we observe a wooden plug of the thickness of a man's leg ; there is a hole here, and the plug is all that we have to keep out the sea. "Immense wealth of metal is contained in the roof of this gallery, through- out its whole length ; but it remains, and will always remain, untouched : the miners dare not take it, for it is part, and a great part, of the rock which forms their only protection against the sea, and which has been so far worked away here that its thickness is limited to an average of three feet only between the water and the gallery in which we now stand. No one knows what might be the consequence el another day's labour with the pick- axe on any part of it. This information is rather startling when communi- cated at a depth of four hundred and twenty feet under ground. We should decidedly have preferred to receive it in the counting-house. It makes us pause for an instant, to the miner's infinite amusement, in the very act of knocking away about an inch of ore from the rock, as a memento of Betel- lack. Having, however, ventured, on reflection, to assume the responsibility of weakening our defence against the sea by the length and breadth of an inch, we secure our piece of copper, and next proceed to discuss the propriety of descending two hundred and forty feet more of ladders, for the sake of visiting that part of the mine where the men are at work. "Two or three causes concur to make us doubt the wisdom of going lower. There is a hot, moist, sickly vapour floating about us, which becomes more oppressive every moment ; we are already perspiring at every pore, as we were told we should, and our hands, faces, jackets, and trousers, are all more or less covered with a mixture of mud, tallow, and iron-drippings, which we can feel and smell much more acutely than is exactly desirable. We ask the miner what there is to see lower down. He replies, nothing but men breaking ore with pickaxes : the galleries of the mine are alike, how- ever deep they may go ; when you have seen one, you have seen all. "The answer decides us : we determine to get back to the surfaae."

The book is illustrated by a dozen coloured views of the most striking landscapes or features. Their forms are picturesque and truthful-looking : a cold grey predominates in the colouring— the only colours being blue and brown.