After dinner we went again to the garden, where we accidentally were witnesses of the return of the royal party from their pic-nic.  The King drove the Queen in a pony phaeton, at the usual pace of monarchs, or just as fast as the little animals could put foot to the ground.  He was a large and well-whiskered man, with a strong family likeness to the English princes.  The attendants were two mounted grooms, in scarlet liveries.  A cadet, a dark, Italian-looking personage, came soon after in full uniform, driving himself, also, in a sort of barouche.  After a short time we were benefited by the appearance of the cooks and scullions, who passed in a fourgon, that contained the remnants and the utensils.  Soon after we got a glimpse of the Queen and three or four of the daughters, at a balcony of the palace, the lady of the net-work being among them.  They all appeared to be fine women.

At the inn I heard with regret that Sir Walter Scott, had passed but two days before.  He was represented as being extremely ill; so much so, indeed, as to refuse to quit his carriage, where he kept himself as much as possible out of view.

We left Stuttgart early the following morning, and as the carriage wound up the mountain that overlooks the town, I thought the place one of singular incongruities.  The hill-sides are in vineyards; the palace, in excellent keeping, was warm and sunny; while the old feudal-looking towers of the castle, rudely recalled the mind to ancient Germany, and the Swissish habitations summoned up the images of winter, snows, and shivering February.  Still I question, if a place so sheltered ever endures much cold.  The town appears to have been built in the nook it occupies, expressly to save fuel.

We met the Neckar again, after crossing a range of wooded mountain, and at Tubingen we once more found a city, a university, the remains of feodality, redoutes, pipes, and other German appliances.  Here we breakfasted, and received a visit from a young countryman, whose parents, Germans, I believe, had sent him hither to be educated.  He will, probably return with a good knowledge of Greek, perfect master of metaphysics and the pipe, extravagant in his political opinions, a sceptic in religion, and with some such ideas of the poetry of thought, as a New England dancing-master has of the poetry of motion, or a teacher of psalmody, of the art of music.  After all, this is better than sending a boy to England, whence he would come back with the notions of Sir William Blackstone to help to overturn or pervert his own institutions, and his memory crammed with second-hand anecdotes of lords and ladies.  We labour under great embarrassments on this point of education, for it is not easy to obtain it, suited equally to the right, and to our own peculiar circumstances, either at home or abroad.  At home we want science, research, labour, tone, manners, and time; abroad we get the accumulated prejudices that have arisen from a factitious state of things; or, what is perhaps worse, their reaction, the servility of castes, or the truculence of revolution.