It was with a rare audacity that the devil pitched his tent in Baden! Perhaps, on the whole continent, another spot could not be found so fully combining, in a small circuit, as many charms of picturesque scenery; and it was a bold conception to set down vice, in all its varieties, in the very midst of--in open contrast as it were to--a scene of peaceful loveliness and beauty. I do confess myself one of those who like living figures in a landscape. I like not only those groupings which artists seem to stereotype, so nearly alike they all are, of seated foreground figures, dark-shadowed observers of a setting sun, or coolly watering cattle beneath a gushing fountain. I like not merely the red-kirtled peasant knee-deep in the river, or the patient fisherman upon his rock; but I have a strong regard--I mean here, where the scene is Nature’s own, and not on canvass--a strong regard for those flitting glimpses of the gayer world, which, in the brightest tints that Fashion sanctions, are caught now, in some deep dell of the Tyrol, now, on some snow-peaked eminence of a Swiss glacier, beside the fast-rolling Danube or the sluggish Nile. I have no sympathy for those who exclaim against the incongruity of pink parasols and blue reticules in scenes of mild and impressive grandeur. Methinks it bespeaks but scanty store of self-resources in those who thus complain, not knowing any thing of the feelings that have prompted their presence there. No one holds cheaper than I do the traveller who, under the guidance of his John Murray, sees what is set down for him through the eyes of the “Hand-book”--mingling up in his addled brain crude notions of history and antiquarianism with the names of inns and post-houses--counsels against damp sheets--cheating landlords--scraps of geology, and a verse of “Childe Harold.” This is detestable: but for otherwise is the meeting with those whose dress and demeanour tell of the world of fashion--the intertwined life of dissipation and excess in solitary unfrequented places. Far from being struck by their inaptitude and unfitness for such scenes, I willingly fall back upon the thought of how such people must be impressed by objects so far beyond the range of daily experience, of objects, whose wondrous meaning speaks to hearts the most cloyed and jaded, “as never man spoke.” I can luxuriate in fancying how long-forgotten feelings, old memories of the past, long buried beneath the load of daily cares, come back fresh and bright under the influence of associations that recall parer, happier hours. I can dwell in imagination on the sudden spring made from the stern ordinances of a world of forms and conventionalities, to that more beautiful and grander world, whose incense is the odour of wild flowers and whose music is the falling cataract.