MONTH IN ENGLAND. * MR. TucimaLuir is an American, who seems

to have landed in Liverpool, made London his head-quarters, and used the railways to run freely about the country. In this mode, he truly observes, much may be seen in a month. It must, however, be seen super- ficially, and require both luck and an original cast of mind to make the seeings worth putting into print.

But the defect of A Month in _England is not that Mr. Tucker- man describes little of mark or novelty, even with the interest which an American's remarks must always have for an English

• A Month in England. By Henry T. Tuckeruian, Author of "The Italian Sketch-book," "Mental Portraits," " Artist Life," Fse. Ste. PUblished by Bentley.

reader. He really has seen but very little. His book is made up of fancies, reveries, reflections, and comment, rather than of obser- vation. His chapter on English authors only involves a visit to Cripplegate Church, or certain localities where eminent writers have lived, died, and been buried. Let the tourist go where he will, Mr. Tuckerman, or at least the writing part of him, must always be uppermost. In his chapter on "Lions," the instances are limited to two,—the Duke of Wellington's funeral, which was just over when Mr. T. arrived, though the " Bunkum " it induced was not ; and the furor in favour of Uncle Tone's Cabin, which is well described. It was "Mango here, Mango there, Mungo every- where." The pilot-boat brought off a newspaper with a flaming ac- count of some honours rendered to Mrs. Stowe ; and the pattern Negro never failed to encounter the institution-supporting tourist go where he would—it met him even in the facetious oratory of the "Judge and Jury Club." When the reader is mostly presented not with things but the im- pression they made upon Mr. Tuckerman, or the suggestions they furnished for "a bit o' writing," of course he soon gets tired. Parts, however, are well done, and some of the contrasts which are drawn between American and English topics are not without interest.

This remark on the different aspect which the hope of rising gives to hard or drudgelike labour in America, compared with England, is worth quoting. "One reason why labour in England appears in its most grim and forlorn aspect is, that little except direct benevolent enterprise cheers the pale headmen. * • * * It is the want of the hope and prospect of advancement

that weighs on the heart of English labour. The native sea-captains at Liverpool see an American sailor arrive in port one day as mate, then as

master, and, finally, as owner, in each stage exhibiting evidence of improved position and resources; while they have continued to exist upon the same limited pay, and effected no opening for their children's welfare. In this world there is a vast amount of drudgery to be done, and there will, doubt- less, always be drudges to do it; the sad phase of this inevitable destiny is, where the encouragement of a future reprieve, the idea of a progressive ex- perience, is withheld. The only drudges I saw in England with the least satisfaction, were those elephantine horses, with the brawniest of limbs, the sleekest of hides, and the most shaggy of fetlocks, attached to the drays. In the stables of Barclay and Perkina's brewery, especially, there is an array of these noble animals that sublimates the idea of muscular labour. To turn from such to the human drudge, and see a beautiful girl's finger worn to the

bone by the process of making steel pens, or a weaver's eyes fevered.with rebellious speculation as he bends such hollow and pallid cheeks over the never-resting loom, startles the coldest heart into pitiful zeal."

Mr. Tuckerman gives a pleasanter sketch of the agricultural labourer than many writers, perhaps because he chiefly saw him from the railway, and associated him with the landscape in which he worked. Of manufacturing towns and their manners he speaks badly.

"Here, as elsewhere in the manufacturing districts, the comparative ex- tortion and ill-manners were obvious. The lofty and far-flashing gas-lights loom through the dingy atmosphere like beacons on a sterile coast. Many of the private factories are discovered, after long search, in the upper rooms of squalid houses, approached by narrow and dirty courts the attempt to gain a true direction from the common people is almost hopeless; they are either stupid or wilfully misinform strangers; and it is scarcely credible that such a number of uncivilized beings can exist in the heart of a Chris. tian land. The picturesque costume of the Swiss and Tuscan peasants, the grace of the French bourgeoisie, and the intelligence of the poorest Yankee, render the rough, boorish, and sometimes malignant lower classes of these

districts, absolutely repulsive, if not fearful in the comparison. But this

squalor and savagery becomes a still more impressive feature to the observer, and a more imperative problem to the philanthropist, from the fact that it is so essentially local. Our way thither exhibited no prophecy of this human

degradation; life in the agricultural, and the ancient towns of the kingdom, is not thus perverted; the tokens of social amenities, the memories of na. tional benefactors, and the grace of rural prosperity, meet the traveller at every step between the drudge and the duke. The journey proves an entire contrast to the arrival."

These impressions of Oxford are striking, and point to the grand distinction after all between the old and the new state of things.

"To the visitor from the New World, where our acquisitions are no sooner made than used, where we study to teach, and the active employment of

learning is the very condition of its attainment, these ancient receptacles of science and letters, crowned with the graces of art, embcsomed in the charms of nature, and hallowed by the memories of so many sages and bards, strike the imagination like an Eastern romance. To sleep in these dormitories, wander under these noble trees, pray in these beautiful chapels, explore un- molested and at leisure, for years, these records of the mind in all tongues and of all ages, is to actualize a grand intellectual dream, and to grow calm in an atmosphere of wisdom. The noiseless doors, carpeted galleries, towers fretted by time and made aerial in moonlight, features of the great departed beaming from the silent walls, green arcades to wander through in June, and dark-veined festal boards around which to cluster on winter nights, forms of saints and martyrs, tomes in which are garnered the choicest pearls of knowledge, hushed rooms opening on corridors dim with time, and vast quad- rangles through which the spring bird's trill wakes the echoes of ages, form an environment to a contemplative nature, which unites the tranquillity of seclusion to the delights of taste."