Differences of country. The Channel & Tra los Montes. North and South.
La verte Ecasse et la bonne Italie. Skelts Dramas. Scotch Scene, Scotch &
English houses, the Hill farm, etc.

Of that individual character which marks out one country from another,
and makes the stands, in the picturesque map of our imaginations, in place
of the reds and greens and yellows of the school atlas, much is doubtless
the result of the primary geological and geographical conditions, but much.
The A country with a long bare seaboard, ean must ever leave a very differ-
ent impression from one that-is-all-eaten-out-in-with-bright-firthe-and-in-
lete into which the bright sea enters deeply, and the firths run far inland
and lie about the roots of mountains like for all the world like lakes, and
the islands are so thickly scattered that they make the sea run between them
half islande shrunken and tortuous like a firth. Mere height of elevation
goes for little; but height of elevation, hills whence we can look abroad
over plains, plains far into whose farthest distance we are followed by the
true aspect of the hills, sharp declivities where that deceive and impose
upon the eye: all these things speak-and-leave-their-mark-broadly-as-we-go
by-them go broadly to make up the colour of the our recollections, and give
to the country that headwa stamp by which we shall afterwards recall it.
But-ever-and-above-all-these-things-these-grand-features-considered-set-as
do, there is-much-that But it is not alone on account of by these gre
grand natural differences, that the impression varies as we go from one
place-country place to another. There are a thousand hundred secondary
differences, sometimes alight in proportion, sometimes, where the primary are

of small consequence, predominating to an immense degree. Everywhere The
vegetation--oh man leaves everywhere his stamp upon the country of his habita-
tion; he-must-suit-the-climate,-indeed,-he-must-submit-himself-indeed-to-the
restrictions-forced-upon-him-by-the-nature-of-the-soil,-but,-within-these-
and the race, the climate and the conditions of the soil, working together,
produce for us this innumerable host of subsidiary dietinotions, make the
flats of Holland different from the flats of ROMNEY Marsh, and distinguish
Japan from England. It is strange, too, what a permanence there is in those
characters, ever, that are most truly dependent on man's taste! I was look-
ing the other day over an illuminated book (dedicated-if-I-remember of the
era of Rene of Anjou, and of-his the work of done-by a french artist; when
suddenly I came on a little miniature of a rural scene, and there was the
great mill, the clumps of underwood edge by the mill-lade, the long poplar
alley of the highway diminishing into distance over the plain, just as we
might see them all in an infinity of places in the france of the present
moment. There was by me at the time one who was expert in these old minia-
tures; and I learned from him that the bas-char-dietin face of England, has
been no less constant than the face of France, and there is-yet-to may be
seen in pictures of the epoch of Henry Sixth, the hedgerows and hedgrow trees
and peaceable fields, that are it's most distinctive features even now. I
was glad to think that this was so; it seemed to bring us nearer to the past
and give us a new acquaintance with the minds of our progenitors.

Now, I believe the channel has done more to tincture, I should not
like-to-say-taint, the spirit of English thought. I was reading the other
day Theophile Gautier's spirited book about of Spanish travel, Tra los Montes,
that a book which is as good an example as any other of the manifold excel-
lences and the radical vice of Gautier's manner and mind--, and I was a good

deal struck by the gentle gradations by which he was passed out of France into Spain; he was educated for the change, he was prepared for it step by step, and long before he had passed the frontier and after it he was no longer already, in all good reason, out of his own land—the one country and in a border land that was neither the one nor yet the other. French melted insensibly into Spanish, through a long succession of patois; French architecture and French scenery did not abruptly end at the custom house, but had begun declining long before