which ordinary travellers can know nothing, except from hearsay, or from points of view too distant to admit of accurate observation. Upon her being presented at court she was struck—as who would not?—by the extravagant appearance of the ladies, who stalked about with fabrics of gauze and ribands a yard high upon their heads, and whalebone petticoats, which with pleasant exaggeration she describes as covering whole acres of ground. The reigning empress perfectly enraptured her with her beauty; and her admiration supplies her with so much eloquence, that a complete picture is wrought out. In other respects the court of Vienna was very much like other contemporary courts—that is, overflowing with every variety of moral turpitude, except that the Viennais had not the hypocrisy to pretend to be virtuous.
From this city our traveller made an excursion into Bohemia, the most desert part of Germany, where the characteristics of the villages were filth and poverty, scarcely furnishing clean straw and pure water, and where the inns were so wretched that she preferred travelling all night in the month of November to the idea of encountering the many unsavoury smells which they abounded with. In this country, however, she made but a short stay, but proceeded across the Erz Gebirge mountains into Saxony. This part of the journey was performed by night. The moonlight was sufficiently brilliant to discover the nature of the frightful precipices over which the road lay, and which in many places was so narrow that she could not discover an inch of space between the wheel and the precipice, while the waters of the Elbe rolled along among the rocks at an immeasurable depth below. Mr. Wortley, who possessed none of the restless sensibility or curiosity of his wife, and preferred a comfortable doze to the pleasure of gazing at moonlit crags throwing their giant shadows over fathom-
