There is no sea-bathing in Europe equal in natural grandeur to either Cape May, or Long Branch. The most frequented watering-place of that sort, on the Continent, is Ostende; but the Belgians are the most unpoetical, unamiable people of Europe. With more historic lore than almost any other modern people, their minds are as flat as their soil,[3] and their manners as unsociable as the Spanish hangman, _Alba_, could have made them. Their religion is petrified, their literature stale, and there is nothing of the ideal in them. It is in the bogs of Flanders where the home-sick Swiss mountaineer is most tempted to commit suicide. Ostende, independent of the beach, which does not compare to our own sea-shore, is extremely dreary. Nothing but sand, sand-hills, and morasses, surround it. It is true, these morasses have been cultivated by the extreme patience and industry of the Flemish peasant, but there is a monotony in their fields and parks, and even in their gardens, which can drive you mad. Every thing answers a useful purpose, but to the imagination it is a dreary waste. Ostende, during the summer season, is nevertheless a picture of Europe in miniature. You can reach it from England in eight hours, from Brussels in six, from Paris in sixteen, from the Rhine (Cologne) in fifteen. Brighton, on the opposite side of the Channel, is nevertheless a paradise to it, if any thing can be called a paradise where, instead of the primitive manners of the first couple, you meet with the exclusive dampness of English society. But nature has blessed that little Island of Great Britain—the Japan of the European sea—with so many gifts, that the strange organization of its society appears to be less the offspring of that peculiar irony which runs through history, than a means of tempering “the envy of less happier lands,” and making them comparatively content with their fate. Every Continental watering-place is crowded with Englishmen, who come there to enjoy social freedom; those of England are nothing but epitomes of the concentric circles which mark the monotonous orbits of the different classes of English society. The elements do not mingle, form no harmonious groups, and have nothing cheering either for the imagination or the heart.