"When I was in the lake of Zug," says our author, "which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, asked me,--_Is it true that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to be seen?_ _Yes_, I replied; _you may go hundreds of miles without coming to a hillock._ _That must be beautiful!_ he exclaimed: _das muss schön seyn...._ This very man, however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for,--even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the _tabula rasa_ which Locke supposed to be the _paradisiacal state of the human mind_--(why is this piece of folly introduced? or what wit or sense can there be in attributing this childish absurdity to Locke?) would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which I believe is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country."[13] [13] We have not thought it worth while to adhere in our quotations to the somewhat affected manner of spelling which the brothers Hare have adopted. For instance, _asked_ and _wished_ are spelt _askt_ and _wisht_: we have but one _l_ in traveller, and the French word _ragouts_ is rather oddly travestied into _ragoos_. The substitution of _t_ for _ed_ in the participle of many verbs, is the most systematic alteration attempted. Now the _d_ and the _t_, as is very well known, slide into one another by such fine gradations that it is impossible to determine, in many cases, which of these two letters most accurately represents the pronunciation in general use. As the termination _ed_ is what is understood by grammarians as the regular form, and is, moreover, in possession of the ground, it seems very futile to take any pains to alter it. In the instances we have already mentioned, wish_t_ for wish_ed_, ask_t_ for ask_ed_, the new orthography is no nearer to the actual daily pronunciation of the words than the old and received mode of spelling. We do not pronounce _wished_ and _asked_ as we do the word _waft_. Give the full sound of the _t_ in these words, and a pronunciation is introduced quite as novel as the mode of spelling.