batteries and ruined castles, rose with awful and unexampled majesty on the south; at its base was the palace formerly belonging to the Elector of Treves, and the town bearing the name of this wonderful fortification; and immediately opposite to it, as we advanced a little farther, the beautiful city of Coblentz appeared. Here we were obliged to be separated from our horse, on account of the Moselle, which discharges itself into the Rhine at this place, the mouth of which we crossed by the assistance of our boatmen’s poles. Over this river there is a handsome stone bridge of many arches, and formerly there was a bridge of boats from this city to Ehrenbreitstein, which has been most judiciously removed, and succeeded by one of the flying bridges before described, by which a more convenient communication is kept completely open, and the navigation is not impeded. Coblentz is a very ancient city; it was the seat of the Roman emperors, and of the kings of the Franks, and a favourite residence of the archbishops and electors of Treves, who, in ancient times of broil and peril, resided in the castle which crowns the majestic rock opposite to the city. Before the revolution there were three parish churches, two colleges, a church belonging to the Jesuits, four convents of monks, dominicans, carmelites, franciscans, and capuchins, and three nunneries. At that period the population of the inhabitants, of the garrison, and the vale of Ehrenbreitstein, was calculated at 13,000 souls; at present it is not supposed to exceed nine thousand. The city has many good and some handsome buildings, and it is further recommended by its supplies of excellent mines, pit-coal, wood, and lime. Its best square is the Clemenstadt; there are several handsome hotels, of which the ancient hotel, the vast rock which formerly protected it, and the antiquity of its buildings, cast a gloomy grandeur over the whole place, which never exhibited so much gaiety as in the winter of 1791, when the French princes and their followers were nobly entertained and protected here by the Elector, before they marched to Champagne, to experience those disasters which finally confirmed the overthrow of their devoted house. Coblentz derives its name by not a little meander of etymology, from the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle at its base. Ausonius, one of the most celebrated of the Latin poets of the fourth century, wrote five hundred verses in commemoration of this river, which, compared with the majesty of the river into which it rolls and is lost, is scarcely worthy of such an honour: the view from its banks is also in an equal degree of comparative inferiority, and by the unceasing agitation of its confluence, it has the reputation of having alarmed the tender nerves of the river-fish, of which the inhabitants of this city are not so well supplied as the neighbouring towns.