t shrine where four monks
formerly lived, devoting their lives to aiding the travellers of
the pass; and some say that its foundation dates from that of the
establishment of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and that both owe their
origin to the same pious hand--an Irish monk. So is it incontestably
true that the great monastery of St. Gall, and the spacious convents
of Mehrer-Au and Loch-Au on the borders of the Lake of Constance, were
founded by an Irishman. What a destiny, that the nation whose mission
should have been the spread of Christianity in the earliest centuries,
should present such a spectacle of crime and God-forgetfulness in our
own!

CHAPTER XII.

I wish my travelling countrymen--and what land tarns ont such myriads
of wanderers?--would betake themselves, in their summer rambles, to the
Tyrol, rather than Switzerland. If the use of German be not as frequent
with us as French, still very little suffices for the every-day
necessities of the road; and while, in point of picturesque beauty,
the tour is little, if any thing, inferior to Switzerland in all
that regards the people, the superiority of the Tyrolese is without a
question.

Switzerland--save in some few remote spots of the German cantons, and
these not generally worth the visiting--is a land of extortion and
knavery. The whole country is laid out pretty much as St. Paul's in
London used to be, some years back--so much for the Aisle, so much for
the Whispering Gallery, so much for the Ball, &c. Each mountain, each
glen, every glacier and snow-peak, has its corps of guides, farming out
by a tariff the wild regions of the roe and the chamois, and vulgarising
the features of nature to the level of the Colosseum in London, and its
pasteboard avalanches.

This may be all very delightful for those junket-ting parties who steam
up the Rhine on a three weeks' excursion, and want to "do Switzerland"
before they reach home--jogging to Chamouni in an omnibus, and riding up
the Rigi in an ass-pannier. But to enjoy mountains--to taste really of
the exquisite sense of impressive solemnity a wild mountain-scene
can suggest,--give me the Tyrol--give me the land where the crashing
cataract is heard in the midst of unbroken stillness--where, in the deep
valleys, the tinkling bell of the herd sounds for miles afar--where,
better than all, the peasant is not degraded from his self-respect
to become a hanger-on of each stranger that he sees, but is still a
peasant,