lute which he had sustained equally with Virgil,-is now about to measure himself with his master in the translation of the Eneid, and who soon, overleaping all kind of bounds, overruns with one flight the expanses of the ideal and physical world? No, gentlemen, nothing in his appearance adverted to his renown. Sometimes he was a teller of enchanting stories, a child to amuse you,-at another time, the listening friend, for he knew how to listen. He would finish discreetly your thought, and lend it all the allurement of his own. If he surprises you in affliction, he forgets his lively and gay humour, as easily as his glory, and you receive from the mirthful man, who promised only diversion, the most useful counsels. If he is always kind, if he spreads his benevolence over a thousand objects, take care not to doubt his fidelity, or the constancy of his sentiments! When he reaches old age, it will be seen, that in the course of a long life, this docile character, so easy in the eyes of the world, has always preserved the inflexibility of honour, has never for gotten a single benefit, or a single remembrance which had charmed him in earlier life. The variety of works meditated by M. Delille, offered the most favourable opportunities to the crouds of images which seemed to press on his memory. If he did not unite them all in the most exact and methodical order, he knew how to animate them with the emotions of his soul, and by the inexhaustible grace of his wit. Let us rejoice that we did not listen to his dull censurers, who reproached him with having too much wit, as they had often reproached Voltaire. Is it difficult to distinguish between that wit which torments itself to keep up with talent, and that wit which follows of itself in its suite? -The one never can disguise its efforts; the other is loved for its na tural manner. This agreeable wit appears to me, in regai what expression is to beauty. It is a species of expression which is not sought after, but which escapes in spite of itself. Into whatever language the works of M. Delille may be translated, the wit of the Frenchman will be always discernible ;-that wit which so particularly distinguishes Montaigne, La Fontaine, Mad. de Sevigni, and Voltaire. If by unexpected approximations he suppresses many intervening incidents,-if he overleaps many boundaries,―he rarely loses himself. How prudently did he chuse his guide! He whom nature seemed to have designed for the Ovid of France, from whence arose his predilection for Virgil? He cherished him, not only as a great model who inspired him, but as a master who restrained him. I figure to myself in Ovid an indulgent preceptor, who favoured in his pupil those brilliant flashes of wit in which he shared :I see in Virgil a master at once ami able and severe, who, far from misleading his dearest disciple, animates, conducts, and encourages him, and governs as much by the ascendant of reason as of genius. We must not doubt, gentlemen, but that it is to this excellent poetic education that M. Delille owes the happy and wise employment of those seductive qualities which nature had lavished upon him. 33 But this was not enough for a poet who must mistrust all the refinements of a too polished age. Full of the study of the ancients, M. Delille wished to see, wished to know himself, the fine climate, the fine sky, which seemed to have inspired and fostered the genius of Homer. A friend of the poet, a generous friend of the muses, M. le Comte de Choiseul Gouffier, was about to fill the embassy to Constantinople, and to visit Greece once more, which he had so nobly traversed, and the ruins of which he had described.-Scarcely had he made known Manners and Situation of the LAP- known the honourable desire to have ge M. Delille soon reached the shores of Ilyssus. After having gathered the grandest lessons in traversing the ruins of Greece, he enjoyed in Constantinople the most magnificent spectacle which nature ever offered to the observation of man. In this place, he began to feel the cruel attacks of that infirmity which menaced him.His sight, fatigued by the splendour and by the variety of objects that surrounded and charmed him, demanded repose in another horizon. He wished once more to see the sky of France, before renouncing that daylight which had so often inspired him, and after having rapidly coloured his imagination with all the splendours of foreign nature, he brought back to his country the treasures of the poet, -recollections, and sentiments. (To be concluded in our next.) WE landed close by several Fin- one another. The sea Finns are not obliged to be nomades like the Fieldt Finns; for the few rein-deer which they may possess they must give up to the care of others. They are therefore fully enabled to build more durable habitations, tations, gammes, or even houses like dence for summer and winter; they There are other sea Finns, who are not contented with a change of resi The merchants are here the true princes of the country. We might divide the land with as much certainty, according to the circles of their influence, as it is at present divided into Prästegieldts. If the clergymen influence the minds of the inhabitants, in return, their temporal felicity is almost always in the hands of the mer chants. The Finns and Norwegians will place their all at stake for the sake of drinking brandy at the merchant's till they fall down. They drink much more than the value of the fish which they bring with them, and the debt is entered in a book, which they carry back, but the contents of which they never compare with their circumstances. The debt at last exceeds the value of their property: they must assign over to the merchant, if he desire it, their house, and the whole of their little possessions, and they esteem themselves fortunate when they are allowed to remain on the spot as farmers. Hence' an iniquitous and avaricious merchant is a pest to the country; but fortunately there are upon the whole but few of such a description in this province; though, if many of them resembled M. Clerke, the active merchant in Qualsund, the most happy and beneficial consequences might every where result from their influence. M. Clerke has put Quans in to several of the Finnish residences which have fallen into his hands, and this has been attended with the most favourable consequences. The industrious Quän soon accomplishes what the drunken Finn never could have done; and if this does not at last excite the attention of the sea Finns, they will in all probability be wholly driven from these coasts. On this subject I once heard a Finn (in Naeverfiord) complaining with a degree of national pride not a little comic. He felt the future conse quences of the settlement of the Quäns the whole way up to Hammerfest, and he complained of the injustice of not restoring to Finns the places obtained from Finns, the indigenous nation. Such a view of the subject may easily be pardoned to a Finnish Laplander, and we may even hear it with some degree of pleasure; but in the mouth of a rational Norwegian, it is somewhat the same as lamenting, that in the free States of America, instead of the indigenous, wandering, and scalping Iroquois and Chippiways, many millions of foreign husbandmen are living on the produce of the soil, and that many thousand spots are now inhabited by emigrants in regions formerly peopled by the wild beasts of the forest and the rattle snake. So long as the Finns shall be possessed of their rage for brandy, nothing can be expected from them that has the least tendency to improvement. If a Quän therefore lives where a Finn formerly lived, the place is occupied by a being of a superior character, and upon the whole * much more humanized. We must judge of men from essentials, and not from forms. That the mind of a Finn is not capable of every degree of cultivation, as well as that of the Finlander in Finland, or the Sclavonic Russian or Pole, who would think of denying? But then this cannot take place till brandy becomes a rarity in the country. The merchants themselves acknowledge, that upon an average not less than from twenty-seven to thirty rix-dollars is annually consumed by the Finn in brandy; this is much more than a whole cask, and also more than half of the annual earnings of a Sea-Finn. They do not drink for the purpose of lightening the severity of their labour, or for the purpose of keeping themselves warm in winter on sea, for they very seldom have brandy in the boat with them in their voyages. They do not drink to assist in the digestion of their meals of fish and fat fish-livers; for they seldom have any brandy in their gammes, and neither Norwegian nor Finn drinks it with fish-livers. All is consumed at the merchant's, and before his door, and the Finn would be himself astonished if he returned from the merchant's without becoming raving mad with the liquor, and afterwards lying for several hours senseless and dead drunk before the door. The scenes which take place when the Finns are assembled on particular occasions, such as fairs or courtdays, may be easily imagined. Particular edicts have been issued for the purpose of prohibiting the merchants under a heavy penalty from furnishing brandy to Finns before the expiring of the first court-day; but the cases notwithstanding are very frequent, when Sorenscriver and Foged have been obliged to return without doing any thing, and to fix a new court-day, because, although the Finns made their appearance, they were lying senseless along the ground, like so many cattle. They do not drink sa hand of fate, the habitations will again continue to be extended along all the streams and lakes connected with the Muonio river, and the Laplanders will be confined within narrower and narrower limits, till at last the whole race will be exterminated. so immensely with impunity. The brandy at last deprives them of their appetite, and they become feeble, powerless, and worn down, and are at last unable to perform the most necessary operations. This is so striking, that one would imagine it would be a warning lesson to them. But they will not be convinced. The charms of brandy are too powerful. With the greatest self-complacency, on account of the unanswerable nature of their argument, they assert that brandy is equally strong and equally nourishing as bread, for, like bread, it is prepared from grain. Thus all the little intellect which the mind of a Finn may be supposed to possess, every spring of activity, and every incentive to improvement, are destroyed and eradicated. Although the Laplanders and Finns may have the same common origin, they have, however, been long separated, and probably long before they came to inhabit the north. We find it extremely probable, when we compare together the old accounts, the customs, and probabilities, that the Laplanders descended from the White Sea towards Norway and Sweden, and that the Finns, on the other hand, ascended from Estonia, through Finland. The two nations are not only at present toto cælo different in their mode of life and cultivation, but they have not even the smallest national physiognomy in common. The Laplanders, as is well known, are in general small; tall men are every where exceedingly rare among them; and such a person as Niels Sara, at Kautokejno, who measured five feet four inches Paris measure, or five feet eight inches English, may not be again found among many hundreds of them. However, such individuals as the two married women whom M. Grape measured would every where be reckoned dwarfs among them. But the Finns, though they remain for centuries in the same country, do not appear to become in the least smaller in size, either at Kautokeino or Muonioniska, than the Swedes or Norwegians. The cause of this is easily discovered; it lies altogether in the difference of cultivation. The polar tribes are small, like all animals and all organic substances which surround them; because they are almost in like manner fully exposed to the oppression and contracting influence of the severe climate, and have not learned to secure themselves from it. The Finn, on the other hand, procures a tropical When we consider that little more than half a century has elapsed since these regions were first cultivated; that formerly they were only occupied by a few families of Laplanders, who wandered about from place to place with their herds; and that now the industrious Finns are thriving in every direction, we cannot help feeling an internal satisfaction, that cultivation and agriculture are thus spreading over parts which were believed to be necessarily doomed to perpetual sterility, and to be inhabited by wandering nomades. There was no doubt a time when Lapland extended itself almost to the town of Torneo. Its boundaries have been gradually removed more and more northwards. They at last became stationary at Muonioniska, more than one hundred and forty English miles above Torneo. They would, however, have been advanced also beyond this place if the numerous emigrations of the Finns into Norway had not occasioned a momentary cessation in the cultivation of Swedish Lapland. When once the Norwegian Fiords are settled, if the active spirit of the Finns is not oppressed by the unrelenting |
