I walk, as in a dream,Beside the sweeping stream,Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:Serene the temples stand,And sleep, on either hand,The palace-fronts along the granite quays.Where golden domes, remote,Above the sea-mist float,The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;And Peter's fortress-spire,A slender lance of fire,Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.The pillared angel soarsAbove the silent shores;Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;And down the watery lineThe exiled Sphinxes pineFor Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.I hear, amid the hush,The restless current's rush,The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:A voice portentous, deep,To charm a monarch's sleepWith dreams of power resistless as his own.Strong from the stormy Lake,Pure from the springs that breakIn Valdaï vales the forest's mossy floor,Greener than beryl-stoneFrom fir woods vast and lone,In one full stream the braided currents pour."Build up your granite pilesAround my trembling isles,"I hear the River's scornful Genius say:"Raise for eternal timeYour palaces sublime,And flash your golden turrets in the day!"But in my waters coldA mystery I hold,—Of empires and of dynasties the fate:I bend my haughty will,Unchanged, unconquered still,And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait."Your fetters I allow,As a strong man may bowHis sportive neck to meet a child's command,And curb the conscious powerThat in one awful hourCould whelm your halls and temples where they stand."When infant Rurik firstHis Norseland mother nursed,My willing flood the future chieftain bore:To Alexander's fameI lent my ancient name,What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore."Then Peter came. I laughedTo feel his little craftBorne on my bosom round the marshy isles:His daring dream to aid,My chafing floods I laid,And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles."I wait the far-off dayWhen other dreams shall swayThe House of Empire builded by my side,—Dreams that already soarFrom yonder palace-door,And cast their wavering colors on my tide,—"Dreams where white temples riseBelow the purple skies,By waters blue, which winter never frets,—Where trees of dusky greenFrom terraced gardens lean,And shoot on high the reedy minarets."Shadows of mountain-peaksVex my unshadowed creeks;Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;And islands, bald and high,Break my clear round of sky,And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers."Then, ere the cold winds chaseThese visions from my face,I see the starry phantom of a crown,Beside whose blazing goldThis cheating pomp is cold,A moment hover, as the veil drops down."Build on! That day shall seeMy streams forever free.Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,The frost shall split each wall:Your domes shall crack and fall:My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"On palace, temple, spire,The morn's descending fireIn thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:Life's rising murmur drownedThe Neva where he woundBetween his isles: he keeps his secret well.
I walk, as in a dream,Beside the sweeping stream,Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:Serene the temples stand,And sleep, on either hand,The palace-fronts along the granite quays.
Where golden domes, remote,Above the sea-mist float,The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;And Peter's fortress-spire,A slender lance of fire,Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.
The pillared angel soarsAbove the silent shores;Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;And down the watery lineThe exiled Sphinxes pineFor Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.
I hear, amid the hush,The restless current's rush,The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:A voice portentous, deep,To charm a monarch's sleepWith dreams of power resistless as his own.
Strong from the stormy Lake,Pure from the springs that breakIn Valdaï vales the forest's mossy floor,Greener than beryl-stoneFrom fir woods vast and lone,In one full stream the braided currents pour.
"Build up your granite pilesAround my trembling isles,"I hear the River's scornful Genius say:"Raise for eternal timeYour palaces sublime,And flash your golden turrets in the day!
"But in my waters coldA mystery I hold,—Of empires and of dynasties the fate:I bend my haughty will,Unchanged, unconquered still,And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.
"Your fetters I allow,As a strong man may bowHis sportive neck to meet a child's command,And curb the conscious powerThat in one awful hourCould whelm your halls and temples where they stand.
"When infant Rurik firstHis Norseland mother nursed,My willing flood the future chieftain bore:To Alexander's fameI lent my ancient name,What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.
"Then Peter came. I laughedTo feel his little craftBorne on my bosom round the marshy isles:His daring dream to aid,My chafing floods I laid,And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.
"I wait the far-off dayWhen other dreams shall swayThe House of Empire builded by my side,—Dreams that already soarFrom yonder palace-door,And cast their wavering colors on my tide,—
"Dreams where white temples riseBelow the purple skies,By waters blue, which winter never frets,—Where trees of dusky greenFrom terraced gardens lean,And shoot on high the reedy minarets.
"Shadows of mountain-peaksVex my unshadowed creeks;Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;And islands, bald and high,Break my clear round of sky,And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.
"Then, ere the cold winds chaseThese visions from my face,I see the starry phantom of a crown,Beside whose blazing goldThis cheating pomp is cold,A moment hover, as the veil drops down.
"Build on! That day shall seeMy streams forever free.Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,The frost shall split each wall:Your domes shall crack and fall:My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"
On palace, temple, spire,The morn's descending fireIn thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:Life's rising murmur drownedThe Neva where he woundBetween his isles: he keeps his secret well.
In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St. Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a horrible little court branching northward from it good old George Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next toNapoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street I know.
In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert, a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance, so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic. Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the Frenchnoblesse, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.
My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago, there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a rough wooden portico before it,—not unlike such a portico as I have recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,—and with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of interludes andburlettas,—that is, of pieces in which the dialogue was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse. The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there was but one step.
It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren, having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre. He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,—father and son are, alas! both dead,—and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the originalSam Wellerin the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,—save in one particular,—they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to hear at clubs and in critical coteries—at the Albion and the Garrick and the Café de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Réunion in Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to reign supreme—rumors about a new actor. The new man was playingMacbethandShylockin Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody—among the bodies who were anybody—had ever heard of him before. Whence he came, or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his name wasFrederick Robson.
Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had already attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.
A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic and his realization of financial success. The critics and the connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor, named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender, half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this, will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?
The Olympic arose "like a phœnix from its ashes." To use language less poetical, a wealthy tradesman—a cheesemonger, I think—found the capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was in the old or the new Olympic—but I think it was in the new one—that the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager. He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious manner. He was a man about town, aviveur, a dandy; and it turned out one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens; and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged himself in the jail.
It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play the part ofJem Baggs, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player, who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson, who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills, considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year. "Vilikins and his Dinah" created afurore. My countrymen are always going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip. Robson's portrait asJem Baggswas in every shop-window. A newspaper began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"—
"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful inJem Baggs. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into preternatural shape.
New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, inMacbeth, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,—and inShylock, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In theYellow Dwarfhe was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,—full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,—an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and theoutré, an unmistakably tragic element,—an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew thecothurnusover his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation ofMedea, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife ofJason, the diabolic loathing in which she holdsCreüsa, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,—all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The originalMedea, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him. She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue."Uomo straordinario!"she went away saying.
I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and afterJem Baggshis brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity—which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him—of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities.A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part ofSir Giles Overreachin "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know thatSir Giles, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing on a purely "legitimate"rôle. I was half persuaded to write a burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do his very best withSir Giles; but a feeling, half of laziness, and half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got farther than the first scene.
By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in reality, a translation from the French.
The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. InDaddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthlessOverreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Molière'sAvareI thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson'sVolpone, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper—the character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens—in Wilkie Collins's play, domestic drama was not hisforte; or, rather, that it was not hisfortissimo. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible, he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could playDaddy Hardacre, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none but himself could at once awe and convulse inMedeaandthe Yellow Dwarf. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,—their eternal grimacing and word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness. Planché retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas. Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his old loves, andJem BaggsandBoots at the Swan,Medeaandthe Yellow Dwarf, continued to be his favorite parts.
The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities, decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury. Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past. The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly destitute of foundation.Don Basilio, in Beaumarchais's play, might have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel, "Calomniez, calomniez, il en résultera toujours quelque chose." He should have taught the world—if the world wants teaching—howto calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he is separated from his wife;and in any case, declare that he drinks. He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the parlor.
Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial papers—the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found—have attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water. The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has for years been overworking himself,—and that latterly prosperity has laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! youshallmake fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out, "I am rich, I have enough,Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios, I will work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me down under my own fig-tree,"—Fortune dismisses him with a sneer: "Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria andennui, take gout and the palsy, with you."
I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We nevercanspare a good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good, bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and our women-singers,—the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't sing, butwillsing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his instance.
Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the bashfulness, themauvaise honte, which made him so shy and retiring in private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.
There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the various views which they have suggested to different observers. The theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences, advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.
I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.
Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition, I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not hitherto been sought.
In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they are also marked with scratches or finestriæ, with grooves and deeper furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of glacier-worn surface.
The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because, the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous, uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A]that we have beneath every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action without actually stopping it,—a kind of grating motion, showing how firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.
It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period, icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no doubt that an immense amount ofdébrisof all sorts is carried to great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore, instead of being from the coast upward.
Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis, but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines, plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say, and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."
There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn away,—furrows will be eaten into more deeply,—fissures will be widened,—clay-slates will be wasted,—while hard sandstone or limestone and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before it.
Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve especial notice, are the so-called "roches moutonnées." They are knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name, because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along preëxisting fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,—while the glacier, moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging knolls known as the "roches moutonnées" in the Alps, and so characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced by water.
Besides their peculiar form, theroches moutonnéespresent all the characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,—while it passed over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however, when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an important means of determining the direction of its motion.
The other characteristic peculiarity of theseroches moutonnéesconsists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds, however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt, therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes, and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.
The appearances about theroches moutonnées, especially the straight scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers, that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it, would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress, especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely, and even to rise far above them. Theroches moutonnéesabout the Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen, without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.
But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,—the latter always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is often still going on. Suchdébrisare found everywhere about disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances, either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date and the local accessions mingling with them.
Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits and thedébrisbrought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz, spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their weight. In the case of thedébâcleof Bagnes, above Martigny, in a valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation ofdébrisdiffers from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles: their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present everywhere the same aspect.
The correlation between these different loose materials and the position in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds. Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.
But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true origin of any accumulation of glacier-débris, commonly called drift, may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns upon it. Thedébrisof which the drift consists are thrown together pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the softer materials into a kind of cement.
The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different. Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs, or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.
I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period, overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character, carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.
In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines, though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to bring the boulders anddébrisof all sorts of which these walls are composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which, when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny. In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines, the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and, indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.
And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England. Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by striæ, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately upon them, extend throughout the realm,—theroches moutonnéesraise their rounded backs from the ground there as in Switzerland,—transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case, let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the parallel roads of Glen Roy.