CORNHILL MAGAZINE.
Anyone who wants half an hour's delightful reading and a brilliant lesson in style should read a partly published account by Thomas Carlyle of a " Three-Days' Tour to the Netherlands." It is written with hardly a trace of Carlyle's considered crabbedness and is of a modernity for which any writer of the present day would prob ably be damned by the older critics. The travellers reach Ostend.
"A heavy country ship came in directly after us, with much noise and jumble, vociferous Dutch scolding heard on board, and tarry irregular men jumping hither and thither. Our little Captain stept ashore with us • two ugly Douaniers in brown-green frocks of coarse cloth, in fiat dogskin caps, with sulky red moustaches, with coarse cutlasses, and not the best air in the world, were gently drawing nigh—to see whether our Royal-navy flag was not perchance a counterfeit. . . . Across the water of this Dock, between us and the main sea, we could read, on a large simple- looking, red-tiled, whitewashed house, one of a little group at some distance : Bier vcrkoopt men Drank, Here a human being sells drink ! "
The Cornhill contains, besides, an entertaining article on " Women Electors " and some agreeable rather than brilliant short stories.
Previous page
