of choice circumscribed at once: and rare is the household that can allow twice that sum annually. He contents himself with the Rhine, or possibly, if more adventurous, he may explore the passes of the Pyrenees; he may unthread the mazes of romantic Auvergne, or make a stretch even to the Western Alps of Savoy. But, for the Mediterranean, and especially for the Levant--these he resigns to richer men; to those who can command from three to five hundred pounds. And next, having submitted to this preliminary limitation of radius, he is guided in selecting from what remains by some indistinct prejudice of his early reading. Many are they in England who start with a blind faith, inherited from Mrs. Radeliffe's romances, and thousands beside, that, in Southern France or in Italy, from the Milanese down to the furthest nook of the Sicilies, it is physically impossible for the tourist to go wrong. And thus it happens, that a spectacle, somewhat painful to good sense, is annually renewed of confiding households leaving a real Calabria in Montgomeryshire or Devonshire, for dreary, sunburned flats in Bavaria, in Provence, in Languedoc, or in the 'Legations' of the Papal territory. 'Vintagers,' at a distance, how romantic a sound! Hops--on the other hand--how mercenary, nay, how culinary, by the feeling connected with their use, or their taxation! Arcadian shepherds again, or Sicilian from the 'bank of delicate Galesus,' can these be other than poetic? The hunter of the Alpine ibex--can he be other than picturesque? A sandalled monk mysteriously cowled, and in the _distance_, (but be sure of _that!_) a band of robbers reposing at noon amidst some Salvator-Rosa-looking solitudes of Calabria--how often have such elements, semi-consciously grouped, and flashing upon the indistinct mirrors lighted up by early reading, seduced English good sense into undertakings terminating in angry disappointment! We acknowledge that the English are the only nation under this romantic delusion; but so saying, we pronounce a very mixed censure upon our country. In itself it is certainly a folly, which other nations (Germany excepted) are not above, but below: a folly which presupposes a most remarkable distinction for our literature, significant in a high moral degree. The plain truth is--that Southern Europe has no romance in its household literature; has not an organ for comprehending what it is that we mean by Radcliffian romance. The old ancestral romance of knightly adventure, the _Sangreal_, the _Round Table_, &c., exists for Southern Europe as an antiquarian subject; or if treated aesthetically, simply as a subject adapted to the ludicrous. And the secondary romance of our later literature is to the south unintelligible. No Frenchman, Spaniard, or Italian, at all comprehends the grand poetic feeling employed and nursed by narrative fictions through the last seventy years in England, though connected by us with their own supposed scenery.