_Skimmings; or a Winter at Schloss Hainfeld in Lower Styria. By Captain Basil Hall, Royal Navy, F. R. S. Philadelphia: Republished by Carey, Lea and Blanchard._ “Skimmings,” we apprehend, is hardly better, as a title than “Pencillings” or “Inklings”—yet Captain Hall has prefixed this little piece of affectation to some pages of interest. His book, we are informed in the Preface, is intended as a pioneer to a work of larger dimensions, and consisting of passages from journals written during three different excursions to the Continent. The specimen now given us is principally valuable as treating of a region but little known, or at least very partially described. Towards the close of April 1834, the Captain, accompanied by his wife and family, being on his way from Rome to Naples, received an invitation from a certain Countess Purgstall to visit her castle or Schloss of Hainfeld near Gratz in Lower Styria. The Countess, whose name and existence were equally unknown to our travellers, was found to be an elderly Scotch lady, who forty years before having married an Austrian nobleman, went with him to Germany, and never {726} returned to Scotland. She claimed moreover to be an early friend of Sir James Hall, the captain's father. Induced by the knowledge of this fact, by the earnest manner in which the old lady urged her invitation, and more especially by a desire of seeing Lower Styria, our author paid her a visit in October, taking the homeward route through that country instead of following the usual track of English travellers through the Tyrol. The Countess Purgstall is a character in whom the reader finds himself insensibly interested. Her maiden name was Jane Anne Cranstoun. She was the sister of Lord Corehouse, and of Mrs. Dugald Stuart—moreover our travellers find her a most agreeable companion and hostess, and discover beyond a doubt that from herself Sir Walter Scott depicted Die Vernon, the most original and spirited of his female paintings. It is, consequently, almost needless to say that in early youth the Countess was a votary of the gay world; and the circumstances under which she was so solicitous for a visit from the son of her old friend, were the more touching on this account. Her only son, a boy of premature talent, having died, she had given herself up to grief; and for three years she had been confined to bed. Captain Hall and his family remained with her, at her urgent desire, until her decease, which took place upon the 23d of March, within a day of the period long before designated by herself for that event.