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Ladies and dwarfs.

One of the oddest of all odd books that ever fell into our hands is Captain Colville Franckland’s Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Russia and Sweden, in 1830 and 1831.  It is one of the hop-step-and-a-jump tours that your fashionable folks make for making acquaintances and then making books.  The gallant author does not stay long enough in a place to be dull; for he is lively and flippant in every page, and throws a dash of the service into every chapter.  He feels that Dr. Granville has left him nothing to say which may not be found in his two great big books; yet the Cholera and the Polish war have supplied him with two topics throughout the whole book; and, dull as these subjects are in themselves, they have enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of seven or eight hundred pages.  His attentions to the softer sex sparkle every where.  At Hamburgh, “we dined at a most excellent table d’hote, but thought the ladies plain and dowdy.”  “We laughed much at the Holsteiner peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, and men like merry-andrews.”  Again,—­

“One of the most pleasing characteristics of Hamburgh, is the neat little, rosy-faced, fair-haired soubrette, tripping along the Yungferstieg, with a basket under her right arm, covered with a handsome shawl of glowing colours.  These enticing damsels look as happy and as coquettish as you can well imagine, and might induce many a traveller to pass a few weeks in Hamburgh who had time to dedicate to the pursuit of the fair nymphs of the Alster.

“But, alas! no good is unaccompanied by evil; hideously deformed dwarfs haunt the streets and promenades of the good town, and the eye of the observer, after having rested with complacency on the round and well-turned form of the smart soubrette, reverts with horror to the miserable Flibbertigibbets which abound in a frightful proportion to the whole population.”

At Hamburgh he finds fun in every thing.

“I was a good deal amused to-day by the funeral cortege of some citizen of consequence.  The bier was surrounded by men dressed in the old Venetian costume of black, with ruffs, well-powdered wigs, and swords by their sides.  I regret to say that I must quit Hamburgh without seeing the Schoene Marianna; but I hear she is now rather passee, and I must console myself for this mortification by gazing upon the first pair of bright eyes which I shall meet to-morrow on my route to Kiel.”

The Russian dwarfs afford our Captain much amusement.

“Madame Divoff, like many other Russian ladies, has a dwarf in her house, who remains constantly with the company.  He is less ugly and disagreeable than others of his species.  La Princesse Serge Gallitzin has a little fellow of this sort; the Lisianskis have also one in constant attendance.  The pretty Mademoiselle Rosetti, two evenings ago, kept caressing the dwarf at Madame Divoff’s ball. (’Beauty and the Beast,’ said I to her; ‘Zemir et Azor.’)