At page 391, Von Raumer alludes to some notices of his historical works in the British Quarterlies. He complains of injustice done him in a review of his “_Letters from Paris in 1830_.” The Reviewer states that our traveller did not court society, and that he professes to have seen and become acquainted only with what strikes the eyes of every observer in the streets, tavern, and theatre. This is denied by Von Raumer, who declares his chief associates to have been “wealthy merchants and distinguished literati, old and new peers, members of the Chamber of Deputies, the most celebrated diplomatists, and three of the present ministers of Louis Philippe.” The remarks of our author upon _Art_, (in the extensive German signification of the word) are worthy of all attention and bespeak an elevated, acute, and comprehensive understanding of its properties and capabilities. Many pages of the work before us are devoted to comments upon the Architecture, the Painting, the Stage, and especially the Music of England, {511} and these pages will prove deeply interesting to a majority of readers. At pages 143 he thus speaks of Mrs. Sloman. Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Sloman, a fiendish shrew, who must have been the torment of her husband's life long before the predictions of the witches. Even in the sleeping scene she betrayed only fear of discovery and punishment; and the exaggerated action, the rubbing of the hands, and seeming to dip them in water, and the rhetorical ‘_to bed!_’ were very little to my taste.... To sum up my impression of the whole—an excess of effort, of bustle, and of accentuation, with every now and then, by way of clap-trap, a violent and yet toneless screaming. Exactly those passages in which these stage passions were the most boisterous and distressing were the most applauded. There is not a single well-frequented German theatre (such as those of Vienna, Berlin or Dresden) in which so bad a performance as this would have been exhibited. Our traveller is in raptures with Windsor, and censures the tasteless folly of Buckingham house. Of the Italian opera in England he speaks briefly and contemptuously—nor does the national music find any degree of favor in his eyes. His criticisms on sculpture and painting are forcible and very beautiful. In some observations on the attic bas-reliefs, and the works from the Parthenon and Phigalia, to be found in the British Museum, he takes occasion to collate the higher efforts of Grecian art with the rudeness of Roman feeling, and the still more striking rudeness of the German and Italian schools of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His remarks here are too forcible and too fresh to be omitted.