objects, but in the moral effect of the traditions, to which these
objects served as talismans of the memory. The scene at sunset
reminded him of the Highlands, but it was those reminiscences which
similar scenes recalled, that constituted the impulse which gave life
and elevation to his reflections. There is not more poesy in the
sight of mountains than of plains; it is the local associations that
throw enchantment over all scenes, and resemblance that awakens them,
binding them to new connections: nor does this admit of much
controversy; for mountainous regions, however favourable to musical
feeling, are but little to poetical.

The Welsh have no eminent bard; the Swiss have no renown as poets;
nor are the mountainous regions of Greece, nor of the Apennines,
celebrated for poetry. The Highlands of Scotland, save the equivocal
bastardy of Ossian, have produced no poet of any fame, and yet
mountainous countries abound in local legends, which would seem to be
at variance with this opinion, were it not certain, though I cannot
explain the cause, that local poetry, like local language or local
melody, is in proportion to the interest it awakens among the local
inhabitants, weak and ineffectual in its influence on the sentiments
of the general world. The "Rans de Vaches," the most celebrated of
all local airs, is tame and commonplace,--unmelodious, to all ears
but those of the Swiss "forlorn in a foreign land."

While in Cheltenham, Mrs Byron consulted a fortune-teller respecting
the destinies of her son, and according to her feminine notions, she
was very cunning and guarded with the sybil, never suspecting that
she might have been previously known, and, unconscious to herself, an
object of interest to the spaewife. She endeavoured to pass herself
off as a maiden lady, and regarded it as no small testimony of the