BLANCHARD JERROLD'S BRIGE-BEAXER..

"IIILL of emptiness" is about the characteristic of the Brage- Beaker. Mr. Jerrold left London in November for Ostend ; got on by railway to Hamburg; thence by dint of rail, coach, and steamer, to Copenhagen ; crossed to Helsinborg in Sweden, then drove to Stockholm in a hired carriage ; and returned by nearly the same route, in time to save his Christmas dinner at Dover. At Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gottenburg, Orebro, and Stockholm, he spent a few days. The rest of the time was occupied in tra- velling, and in the depth of winter—often by night as well as by day. The precise object of his journey does not appear. From the prominence given to Swedish railways and the energetic man by whose untiring exertions they have been at last begun, it is probable the railway interest had something to do with the book and the journey.

"When a man has nothing to say, he should say nothing" : but the observance of this sound rule would, have cut Mr. Jerrold's book down to a few chapters. A writer must possess rare qualities both of observation and depiction to find much to describe in a continuous run from London to Hamburg; by night joumies or by day journies when the day was nearly as dark as night, and the traveller nearly perishing with cold; or in a hasty stroll through a foreign city. Mr. Jerrold ekes out his paucity of matter by wordy sketching of the commonest stamp. Between London and Dover he " does " a citizen and family in the train' and wonders why staid men of business affect nautical interest when bound for the seaside. The sea-sickness of self and fellows is his Channel topic. From Hamburg to Stockholm, the immensity of furs laid in by one fellow travelling companion, hight "the captain," and the sleepi- ness of another, nicknamed Poppyhead, are staple matters for word-spinning. When Europe furnishes nothing he jumps to America, for a contrast between the woods of New Brunswick and those of Sweden. Of course at Copenhagen he handles the bom- bardment, and confounds Nelson's attack upon the Danish fleet in 1801 with the bombardment of the city in 1807, when Admiral Gambier commanded the fleet, and Lord Cathcart the land forces, in which Wellington served. It was perhaps a poetical licence

for Campbell to sing

"Then Denmark bless' d our chief,

That he gave her wounds repose "' -

but we believe the Danes bear no enmity for Nelson's attack. On the

contrary, they look upon it as a feather in their cap, for the great Admiral was never so met in his life. But, however they regard it, the attack was quite justifiable. The British plenipotentiary quitted Copenhagen on the 20th March 1801, his demands not having been complied with. It was not till the 30th that the fleet reached the Sound, and the battle was not fought till the 2d of April ; the Danes knowing perfectly well what was coming, and having made capital preparations to receive us. The seizure of the fleet in 1807 was undoubtedly a strong measure. Men differed at the time, and, notwithstanding the revelations since made, will continue to differ, as to its justifiableness. But there is no doubt whatever that Napoleon intended to seize the Danish fleet to invade England; which the high-handed proceeding of seizino.p the fleet prevented. On these two matters Mr. Jerrold lucubrateth thus. "There are men, I thought, (as I walked about the streets,) in this busy, happy city, who can remember seeing Nelson, followed by the murmurs of the populace, make his way to the palace of the Prince Royal, and there en- deavour to bring him to the terms proposed by Admiral Parker. These terms were, that Denmark should cease to belong to the confederation of neutral powers ; that her ports should be freely opened to English vessels ; and that a British force should be stationed in Denmark to protect her from the vengeance of her former allies. The reply of the Prince was princely— he would sooner be buried in the ruins of his capital than consent to this base desertion. That year (1807) was a terrible year in the history of Den- mark. Even now the Danes talk, I am told, with darkened expressions, of the 2d of September, when the English fleet opened its murderous attack upon the city. Sixty hours incessant bombardment ; the sky raining shells upon these noble towers; three hundred buildings laid in ashes' and then a capitulation that made every brave Dane gnash his teeth with rage. The British fleet took possession of twenty-five ships of the line, sixteen frigates, and fifty smaller ships ; and left the Danes powerless to oppose their author- ity in the Baltic."

Rarely has so much inaccuracy been crowded into so small a space. Take dates alone. Nelson's action did not last half a day. Campbell's line would have kept the lucubrator right as to the month.

"It was ten of April morn by the chime :

As they drifted on their path, There was silence deep as death, And the boldest held his breath For a time."

September 1807 !—Nelson was dead and buried long before. Tra- falgar, October 21, 1805; St. Paul's Cathedral, January 9, 1806.

There is a chapter in Mr. B. Jerrold's book on trading statistics, in which the light style and the heavy facts singularly contrast. The latter are doubtless taken cat and dry from some tables and imbedded in a commentary. There is also information about the peasantry in Sweden, picked up from a companion en route, with little bits here and there from observation by the author. These, however, bear no sort of proportion to the more empty writing. Neither have they much novelty, except the panegyric on Gotten- burg, in opposition to Mr. Laing's old depreciatory account, lately revived in a cheap reprint.

"This was perhaps a true picture in 1834, but it was ludicrously false in 1852. Gustavus Adolphus, the great founder of the city, prophesied that it

• A Brage-Beaker with the Swedes; or Notes from the North in 1852. By W. Blanchard Jerrold. Illustrated from Sketches by the Author. Published by Cooke. would presently be the great centre of Scandinavian commerce : now that prophecy is fulfilled. Whether Gottenburg may rank with certain commer- cial ports or not, is a question open to discussion; but that it is the Liver- pool of the Scandinavian peninsula even now, and that its streets are thronged daily with active merchants—that its port is filled with vessels, and that its commercial men are rising. daily in the estimation of the mer- chants of Europe—are points admitted in every market-place. The rapidity with which its commerce is increasing may be shown by the returns of its exportations to England. For example, in 1850, 12,000 tons of wood left this port for England ; in the following year, 27,000 tons were consigned to the same destination. In 1850, England imported from Sweden no less than 29,500 tons of iron, and nearly all the oats raised in the peninsula. In truth, the activity apparent in every part of the city, when, on the morning after my arrival, I strolled down its handsome streets, under cloudless heavens, and with the invigorating influence of a sharp, dry frost, was startling. Fine ships lay alongside the quays ; English sailors were strolling about; the Swedish guards (tall, handsomely-equipped troops) were marching to and fro ; serious men were tripping hastily from office to office ; and in the centre of the broadest street were two omnibuses, the appearance of which carried one mentally to Paddington. A flourish on the horn, in which the conductors indulged at starting, destroyed the illusion.

"Gottenburg may be described in a few words, as a city consisting chiefly of three or four fine wide streets, intersecting one another at right angles; each street ornamented with a canal running through its central space, flanked on either bank by fine rows of trees. When I write broad streets, I mean thoroughfares considerably wider than the Parisian boulevards. The houses in the principal thoroughfares are high and substantial, not remark- able for any architectural beauties, yet offering solid comfortable homes to business men. Their exterior and interior closely resemble large French houses. Here is the same huge getaway; the same division of the premises into floors for separate families ; the same large rooms or galleries; the same

snue' antechambers, sacred often to scandal. •

"We spent the day after our arrival in Gottenburg in strolling about the town, in watching the shifting phases of its daily operations. In the even- ing, to my particular astonishment, the streets were brilliantly lighted with gas ; an advance which Stockholm has not yet made in modern improve- ments, but is now on the point of making."

Mr. B. Jerrold's pencil is better than his pen. The volume abounds in graphic sketches, which when not dashed by caricature give a much better idea of objects than the writer can accomplish.