nly hospitality.

But we must descend to the world again; we must, as the poet said,

"Bridle in our struggling muse with pain,
That longs to launch into a nobler strain."

We bid farewell to a description of the indescribable.

During this week, but one question was asked by the universal world
of St James's--"What was the cause of the Czar's coming?"

Every one answered in his own style. The tourists--a race who cannot
live without rambling through the same continental roads, which they
libel for their roughness every year; the same hotels, which they
libel for their discomforts; and the same _table-d'hotes_, which they
libel as the perfection of bad cookery, and barefaced
_chicane_--pronounced that the love of travel was the imperial
impulse. The politicians of the clubs--who, having nothing to do for
themselves, manage the affairs of all nations, and can discover high
treason in the manipulation of a toothpick, and symptoms of war in a
waltz--were of opinion, that the Czar had come either to construct an
European league against the marriage of little Queen Isabella, or to
beat up for recruits for the "holy" hostilities of Morocco. With the
fashionable world, the decision was, that he had come to see Ascot
races, and the Duke of Devonshire's gardens, before the sun withered,
or St Swithin washed them away. The John Bull world--as wise at least
as any of their betters, who love a holiday, and think Whitsuntide
the happiest period of the year for that reason, and Greenwich hill
the finest spot in creation--were convinced that his Majesty's visit
was merely that of a good-humoured and active gentleman, glad to
escape from the troubles of royalty and the heaviness of home, and
take a week's ramble among the oddities of England. "Who shall
decide," says Pope, "when doctors disagree?" Perhaps the nearest way
of reaching the truth is, to take all the reasons together, and try
how far they may be made to agree. What can be more probable than
that the fineness of the finest season within memory, the occurrence
of a moment of leisure in the life of a monarch ruling a fifth of the
habitable globe, roused the curiosity of an intelligent mind,
excited, like that of his great ancestor Peter, by a wish to see the
national improvements of the great country of engineering,
shipbuilding, and tunnelling; perhaps with Ascot races--the most
showy exhibition of the most beautiful horses in the world--to wind
up the display, migh