and improvement, if it does not lead us to fritter away attention on too many pursuits. By looking out of ourselves, we gain knowledge: by being little satisfied with what we have done, we are less apt to sink into indolence and security. To conclude with a piece of egotism: I never begin one of these Essays with a consciousness of having written a line before; and having got to the end of the volume, hope never to look into it again.

ESSAY XIV.

HOT AND COLD.

"Hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mastery."

MILTON.

"THE Protestants are much cleaner than the Catholics," said a shopkeeper of Vevay to me.

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They are so," I replied; "but why should they?" A prejudice appeared to him a matterof-fact, and he did not think it necessary to assign reasons for a matter-of-fact. That is not my way. He had not bottomed his proposition on proofs, nor rightly defined it.

Nearly the same remark, as to the extreme cleanliness of the people in this part of the country, had occurred to me as soon as I got to Brigg, where, however, the inhabitants are Catholics.. So the original statement requires some qualification as to the mode of enunciation. I had no

sooner arrived in this village, which is situated just under the Simplon, and where you are surrounded with glaciers and goitres, than the genius of the place struck me on looking out at the pump under my window the next morning, where

the "neat handed Phyllises were washing their greens in the water, that not a caterpillar could crawl on them, and scouring their pails and tubs that not a stain should be left in them. The raw, clammy feeling of the air was in unison with the scene. I had not seen such a thing in Italy. They have there no delight in splashing and dabbling in fresh streams and fountains—they have a dread of ablutions and abstersions, almost amounting to hydrophobia. Heat has an antipathy in nature to cold. The sanguine Italian is chilled and shudders at the touch of cold water, while the Helvetian boor, whose humours creep through his veins like the dank mists along the sides of his frozen mountains, is "native and endued unto that element." Here everything is purified and filtered: there it is baked and burnt up, and sticks together in a most amicable union of filth and laziness. There is a little mystery and a little contradiction in the case let us try if we cannot get rid of both by means of caution and daring together. It is not that the difference of latitude between one side of the Alps and the other can signify much; but the phlegmatic blood of their German ancestors is poured down the valleys of the Swiss like water, and iced in its progress; whereas that of the Italians, besides its vigorous origin, is enriched and ripened by basking in more genial plains. A single Milanese market-girl (to

go no farther south) appeared to me to have more blood in her body, more fire in her eye (as if the sun had made a burning lens of it), more spirit, and probably more mischief about her, than all the nice, tidy, good-looking, hard-working girls I have seen in Switzerland. To turn this physiognomical observation to a metaphysical account, I should say then that Northern people are clean and Southern people dirty as a general rule; because, where the principle of life is more cold, weak, and impoverished, there is a greater shyness and aversion to come into contact with external matter (with which it does not so easily amalga mate), a greater fastidiousness and delicacy in choosing its sensations, a greater desire to know surrounding objects and to keep them clear of each other, than where this principle, being more warm and active, may be supposed to absorb outward impressions in itself, to melt them into its own essence, to impart its own vital impulses to them, and in fine, instead of shrinking from everything, to be shocked at nothing. Southern temperament is (so to speak) more sociable with matter, more gross, impure, indifferent, from relying on its own strength; while that opposed to it, from being less able to react on external applications, is obliged to be more cautious and particular as to the kind of excitement to which it renders itself liable. Hence the

The

It

timidity, reserve, and occasional hypocrisy of Northern manners; the boldness, freedom, levity, and frequent licentiousness of Southern ones. would be too much to say, that if there is anything of which a genuine Italian has a horror, it is of cleanliness; or that if there is anything which seems ridiculous to a thorough-bred Italian woman, it is modesty but certainly the degree to which nicety is carried by some people is a bore to an Italian imagination, as the excess of delicacy which is pretended or practised by some women is quite incomprehensible to the females of the South. It is wrong, however, to make the greater confidence or forwardness of manners an absolute test of morals: the love of virtue is a different thing from the fear or even hatred of vice. The squeamishness and prudery in the one case have a more plausible appearance; but it does not follow that there may not be more native goodness, and even habitual refinement, in the other, though accompanied with stronger nerves and a less morbid imagination. But to return to the first question.* I can readily understand how a Swiss peasant should stand a whole morning at a pump, washing

* Women abroad (generally speaking) are more like men in the tone of their conversation and habits of thinking, so that from the same premises you cannot draw the same conclusions as in England.