211 I. MEMORANDA AT MUNICH. SEPT. 28th.-A week at Munich! and nothing done! nothing seen! My first excursions I made to-day-from my bed to the sofa-from the sofa to the window. Every one told me to be prepared against the caprices of the climate, but I did not imagine that it would take a week or a fortnight to be acclimatée. What could induce the princes of Bavaria to plant their capital in the midst of these wide, marshy, bleak, barren plains, and upon this rough unmanageable torrent,—" the Isar rolling rapidly," when they might have seated themselves by the majestic Danube? The Tyrolean Alps stretching south and west, either form a barrier against the most genial airs of heaven, or if a stray zephyr find his way from Italy, his poor little wings are frozen to his back among the mountain snows, and he drops shivering among us, wrapt in a misty cloud. I never saw such fogs: they are as dense and as white as a fleece, and look, and feel too, like rarefied snow ;-but as no one else complains, I think it must be indisposition which makes me so peevish and so chilly. Sitting at the window being my best amusement, I do not like to find the only objects which are to give me a foretaste of the splendour of Munich, quite veiled from sight, and shrouded in mist, even for a few morning hours. I am lodged in the Max-Joseph's-Platz, opposite to the theatre: a situation at once airy, quiet, and cheerful. The theatre is in itself a beautiful object; the portico, of the Corinthian order, is supported by eight pillars; the ascent is by a noble flight of steps, with four gigantic bronze candelabras at the corners; and nothing, at least to my unlearned eyes, could be more elegant — more purely classical and Greek, than the whole, were it not for the hideous roof upon the roof, -one pediment, as it were, riding on the back of the other. Some internal arrangement of the theatre may render this deformity necessary, but it is a deformity, and one that annoys me whenever I look at it. |