ART. VI.-1. Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers. By Members of the Alpine Club. Edited by JOHN BALL, M.R.I.A. F.R.S. Fifth Edition. Longmans. 1860.

2. Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1860. Edited by FRANCIS GALTON, M.A. F.R.S. Macmillan. 1861.

3. A Guide through the District of the Lakes. Fifth Edition. By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 1835.

THE industrious reader of daily journals in vacation months must have observed a new class of summer correspondence, which has come, within these few years, to the rescue of those much toiling operatives, the sub-editors on duty on sweltering August nights. It is not so long since no traveller on his annual trip would have thought of taking up his pen to indite anything to the Times except an hotel grievance, a solar eclipse, or the vivid picture of a city in revolution. Now, on the contrary, Alpine enterprise-in possession of an organisation of its own, of men who write and men who work has grown from books and articles into newspaper controversy, the sure sign in any party of the possession of an outside public. The respective merits of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa season the morning's coffee and the evening tea in country houses and pleasant parsonages, and when conversation gets slack, the morality of Alpine climbing forms a very useful resource, round the dinner or the work table, for prosy seniors or flirting juniors. There is a great facility for easy truism on either side of the question, while practical common sense and gentle chivalry respectively finds its subject-matter made to hand. Probably some brother or some lover, some cousin or some friend, has climbed, or will climb, or is supposed to be about to climb, some peak still uncontaminated by the miscellaneous throng, still unrepresented in Piccadilly entertainments. The last letter in the Times, cheeringly and jauntingly recording a fresh Alpine victory, affords a starting point only inferior to the horrid interest of a thrilling railway accident, or a gigantic metropolitan fire, equal, indeed, to the awe in which careful and palpitating dames regarded fox hunting in the jolly times when the squires indulged in deep over-night potations. In the meanwhile, the Alpine Club holds good its own. It talks, writes, records, publishes, dines, keeps up its numbers, excites the longings of the tourist public, and altogether shows itself very tolerably

indifferent to the ethical problems which its proceedings have originated.

Non nostrum est tantas, pueri, componere lites

we should regard with equal regret the sudden cessation or the abnormal extension of the mountain mania, while of the two dangers we should be rather more inclined to fear the second. The rifle movement will not improbably, as it has been acutely said, thin the numbers of those who merely go abroad to kill time and keep themselves in exercise; young men who can spend their time more healthfully, and for themselves more amusingly, at Hythe, than in tramping from realm to realm, in exaggerated shooting coats, with cigar in mouth, and Continental Bradshaw in hand. But the reduction of this class will open out the way to another description of tourists, rather less unintelligent than the kill-times, but peculiarly unsuited for the stern toils of the mountain; the tourists who think it right to see things, and to seem to understand what they see without any sufficient amount of original knowledge, or decided bias for anything in particular-bouncing patres familias, average members of learned professions, and walking young ladies. These are all persons peculiarly open to contagion. Cautious and family Swiss touring has almost in a lifetime grown up from a lounging saunter in the valleys of Hasli and Lauterbrunnen, and the towns which line the lakes of Geneva, Thun, and Lucerne, to the breezy walk across the Oberland, and the Chamouni expedition; and upwards again from these now familiar feats, to the Gemmi and the Grimsel, and the exploration of the Zermatt and the Saas valleys. It now seems to involve the attainment in the course of each single season of half-a-dozen heights, with a combined altitude of 70,000 or 80,000 feet. Feats like these are all very well for the élite of the Alpine Club, but they are worse than mischievous for the general English multitude. The fatal Alpine accidents, which have from time to time startled us at home, have been generally due to the culpable and boastful ignorance of some ill-advised tourist, who has thought it a fine thing to stake the lives and limbs of his honest and courageous guides against the silly reputation which he is likely to gain from his having been pulled, half numbed, and half fainting, by them, over some tremendous Col. For it must never be forgotten that high Alpine climbing is, at the best, playing with life and death. The risks must be, under the most favourable circumstances, tremendous, when, as one of the most distinguished Alpine climbers told us, the scrambler thinks himself well off if he finds just enough of ledge along the precipice to support the tips of his

fingers and the points of his toes. Under all circumstances, too, good or bad, the main share of the merit is justly due to those by whom the chief precautions are taken, the chief investigations made, and the chief dangers won-the guides. The traveller, therefore, who pays one of these fine fellows to imperil not only his own existence, but the livelihood of his family, for the sake of adding one more asterisk to the list of the Alpine Club's ascended peaks, incurs a great responsibility. So does the climber himself, for suicide is no more lawful than murder, and the lives which are risked are often among the choicest and those which we should least willingly spare. Professor Tyndall's adventure, to which we shall have to refer, in the ice chimney at the Matterhorn was sufficiently exciting, but the life at stake in that dilemma is one which has given many pledges to science. Still, we should be sorry to see Alpine scaling go out of fashion. Whether the thing is philosophical or not, it is a plain fact that muscle and pluck not only possess, but are meant to possess, a great and salutary influence in the conduct of the world's affairs, and that the nation which has the luck to exhibit them most conspicuously in the face of its neighbours, in the least pugnacious and offensive manner, goes far to win both respect and power. Now then, there can hardly be anything much less pugnacious or offensive than waging war against glaciers and peaks. In this campaign England has got the monopoly. The Alpine summits are politically the property of the Swiss Confederation, but practically they are the freehold of the Alpine Club, which has its head quarters in London. Germans reason upon this English passion for heights, and are puzzled; Frenchmen do not attempt to reason, and are still more puzzled; and among their many imitations of Englishmen, Americans hardly yet seem to have hit upon this particular one.

The bull

That makes this run is John, not Jonathan.

What the natives in general think of those adventurous islanders, whether they reverence them as inspired, or despise them as madmen, or with oriental feeling think them mad, and therefore reverence them, it is not within our power to say. Perhaps their feeling is a sort of dull gratitude to Providence for having created England to pour francs into Swiss pockets. But the result is the same, the topmost peaks of Europe are the Briton's inheritance. It is somehow natural that it should be The healthy old Norse blood, of which so many rivulets circulate through our veins, still makes itself felt in this late century of artificial civilization. The same spirit which makes

so.

the Englishman emigrate so well, where he has to cut and win his way before him through the forest; the same spirit which makes him hunt and shoot, boat and play cricket for his pastime; the same spirit which makes him shoulder the volunteer rifle at the first breath of danger, drives him to attempt the Matterhorn. Science has made some of the best climbers, and they deserve the first praise. Daring is the motive power of the second class, and under due limitations we do not refuse praise to the men who are cautious, not less than brave, and who will not voluntarily risk lives for vanity or selfishness.

But all the more strongly we are convinced that those who can be morally justified in running these risks and incurring these fatigues are an exceptional body, and that the person who endeavours, without being tolerably sure of his vocation, to follow their example, is not far short of belonging to the same class as those proverbially are, who are their own lawyers. Albert Smith did get to the top of Mont Blanc and he came down again, and society was the gainer by this daring attempt of the jovial Londoner. But any guide at Chamouni will tell the inquirer that the attempt was a very foolhardy one, and that nothing could have pulled the experimentalist through but the extraordinary number of guides whom he took with him. One of them was casually asked by a traveller whether he had gone up with 'M. Smith,' and answered, 'O yes, that it was he him'self who had supported M. Smith when he fainted on the sum'mit, and gave him spirits to revive him.'

In proof that we are not exaggerating the perils of the enterprise, we shall call upon mountaineers to tell their own tale, and for the purpose, we shall not go further than the records of Alpine scramblings contained in Mr. Galton's Vacation Tourists in 1860. We should have gladly given a précis of Professor Tyndall's narrative of the frightful route by which, in company with Mr. Hawkins, he proceeded from Lauterbrunnen to the Eggisch-horn by the Lauinen-Thor; or, in plainer language, scrambled from the valley of the Aar, clean over the central Oberland group, into the valley of the Rhone. But we pass on to a still more daring feat of these two travellers, as narrated by Mr. Hawkins, which followed immediately after that passagethe attempted, but unhappily not perfectly successful, ascent of the steepest and boldest of European mountains, the Matterhorn, or Mont Cervin, on whose side they were the first of travellers to plant even a single footstep, so gloomily remote stands this giant peak among its solitary glaciers:

Actual contact immensely increases one's impressions of this, the hardest and strongest of all the mountain masses of the Alps; its form is more remarkable than that of other mountains, not by chance, but because it is built of

more massive and durable materials, and more solidly put together: nowhere have I seen such astonishing masonry. The broad gueiss blocks are generally smooth and compact, with little appearance of splintering or weathering. Tons. of rock, in the shape of boulders, must fall almost daily down its sides, but the amount of these, even in the course of centuries, is as nothing compared with the mass of the mountain; the ordinary processes of disintegration can have little or no effect on it. If one were to follow Mr. Ruskin, in speculating on the manner in which the Alpine peaks can have assumed their present shape, it seems as if such a mass as this can have been blocked out only while rising from the sea, under the action of waves such as beat against the granite headlands of the Land's End. Once on dry land, it must stand as it does now, apparently for ever.'

Of the various perils which the adventurers had to encounter in the ascent, and again, upon the descent, we shall only offer one as a sample of what composes the summer pleasures of an Alpine Clubbist:

'Soon our difficulties begin; but I despair of relating the incidents of this part of our route, so numerous and bewildering were the obstacles along it; and the details of each have somewhat faded from the memory. We are immersed in a wilderness of blocks, roofed and festooned with huge plates and stalactites of ice, so large that one is half disposed to seize hold and clamber up them. Round, over, and under them we go; often progress seems impossible; but Bennen, ever in advance, and perched like a bird on some projecting crag, contrives to find a way. Now we crawl singly along a narrow ledge of rock, with a wall on one side, and nothing on the other: there is no hold for hands or alpenstock, and the ledge slopes a little, so that if the nails in our boots hold not, down we shall go; in the middle of it a piece of rock juts out, which we ingeniously duck under, and emerge just under a shower of water, which there is no room to escape from. Presently comes a more extraordinary place: a perfect chimney of rock, cased all over with hard, black ice, about an inch thick. The bottom leads out into space, and the top is somewhere in the upper regions: there is absolutely nothing to grasp at, and to this day I cannot understand how a human being could get up or down it unassisted. Bennen, however, rolls up it somehow, like a cat; he is at the top, and beckons Tyndall to advance; my turn comes next; I endeavour to mount by squeezing myself against the sides, but near the top friction suddenly gives way, and down comes my weight upon the rope :-a stout haul from above, and now one knee is upon the edge, and I am safe: Carrol is pulled up after After a time, we get off the rocks, and mount a slope of ice, which curves rapidly over for about three yards to our left, and then (apparently) drops at once to the Zmutt glacier.'

me.

The same volume contains the ascent of the Allelein-horn, by Mr. Leslie Stephen. One parenthetical event in crossing an hitherto untrodden glacier, is dismissed in a few words :

'Suddenly, one of the party all but disappeared. A narrow crevasse had opened beneath him like a trap-door. With his feet wedged against one side, his shoulders against the other, and his back resting upon nothing at all, it was well for him that the crevasse had not been a little broader. The man behind caught him by the collar as he went down, and in a moment he was on his feet again, on sound footing. But the view of the two parallel walls of green ice sinking vertically downwards into utter darkness, has often come back to me since. Somehow, no one even then suggested the rope, and we plodded quietly and sleepily along-fortunately without further accident. I