A short distance from the garden is a park in which wild boars are kept for hunting. The religion of the dutchy is Lutheran. The affairs of the state are conducted by a court of regency, and other courts, composed of counsellors and a president, who regulate the military, administer the laws, digest the finance, and superintend all matters that relate to religion. Those who complain of “the law’s delay” in England, would be speedily reconciled to the tardity of its progress were they to commence a suit in Germany, where it excited considerable surprise that the procrastination of Mr. Hastings’ trial, which lasted _seven years_ and _three months_, should have caused any murmurs amongst us, that period being thought a moderate one by almost every German. Living in this dutchy is very cheap: a bachelor can keep a horse, dine at the first table d’hôte, and drink a bottle of wine a day, and mingle in the best circles, upon one hundred pounds per annum. The society in Darmstadt is very agreeable. As the minds of the men and women are so highly cultivated and accomplished in Germany, every party presents some mode or other, equally delightful and blameless, to make Time smile, and to strew over his passage with flowers. The country round Darmstadt is very beautiful, and abounds with corn and various sorts of fruit-trees, which are frequently unprotected by any fence, and the common path winds through avenues of them. Amongst other delicious fruit, there is a red plumb called zwetschen, peculiar to the south of Germany, which grows in great richness and luxuriance in this dutchy. As a proof of the profusion in which it grows, in one of my rambles with some friends, I met a boy laden with a basket full of them, who sold us 130 for some little pieces, amounting to a penny English; and the little rogue looked back with an arch smile as we separated, as if he had made a highly profitable bargain. As I was walking in the principal street with a friend of mine, I was struck with the following expression: “Look at that officer; would you believe it that with so fine a person, and a mind to correspond with it, he has received _two baskets_?” My surprise at the expression was dissolved by being informed, that when a lady refuses an offer of love, she sends the luckless lover a little basket as a token of her disinclination to receive his addresses. The French interest is powerful in Darmstadt, although amongst all the princes of the Rhenish confederation, no one has displayed more energy and spirit than the Grand Duke. A striking instance of this occurred to one of my companions: in this dutchy, and I believe in other parts of Germany, there is a law that renders it penal to drive off the road upon the grass, but the postillion who drove him, having, to spare his horses, offended against the law, archly turned round to him and said, “Pray, Sir, in case I should be prosecuted, say you are a Frenchman, and then they will not make me pay the penalty.”