authority and influence, grew up good
republicans too, and joined the peasantry of Altorf
and Stanz in rejecting the supremacy of any
sovereign.

When a people will not and do not pay
rent, it is difficult to induce them to pay taxes,
at least, to a distant sovereign. The English
found this to be the case with their colonies
in America; and they thought it very new
and very strange. History, however, could
have shown them an example in the annals
of Switzerland. For, though the dwellers
in the forest cantons had no landlords or
lands, the Austrian princes deemed that
they, at least, might raise a revenue from
the free peasants. To tax their lands was
indeed hopeless; but a bailiff, established in
a strong castle at the mouth of the valley, at
Altorf, at Stanz, or at Brunnen, might
prevent any mountain commodity, such as cheese,
from being exported to the plain country to be
sold, or any article being brought back in
exchange, except by the payment of a duty
to him, the Austrian bailiff, who hoisted the
sign of the double eagle over his portcullised
gateway.

Old chroniclers had a thorough contempt
for, and ignorance of, political economy.
They never observe, much less hint, why there
was no upper, or landlord, or knightly class
in the Swiss valleys. They had no idea
that nature could be democratic by a mere
stinting of produce, or barrenness of soil. So
that the lordly annalist attributes all to
the perverseness of the Swiss peasant; the
Swiss chronicler to the innate nobleness of
his nature. Neither do they dwell upon the
fiscal pretensions of the bailiff of Austria, nor
do they hint at the source of revenue from
whence he was to pay his archers and his men-
at-arms. They depict Gessler as the villain
of the tragedy — insisting that his cap, or the
ducal cap of Austria, should be done reverence
to in the market-place of Altorf; or else going
to live at free quarters in the house of the
comfortable Schwytz farmer, and committing the
indignity of ordering the farmer's wife to
prepare a bath for him. The fact which the
chronicler objects to Gessler, is not so much
his rapacity, as his cruelty and insolence.

The Niebuhrs and Strausses have been
nibbling at the story of Gessler and Tell,
and would persuade honest men to doubt its
authenticity. Why, or with what view, I
am at a loss to conceive. Certainly never
did the scent of a tradition lie stronger.
The country has been in the hands of
the victors ever since the victory. It was
not, like Greece or Rome, overrun by
barbarians, who threw and who trod down
edifices, vestiges, and recollections, all of
which had to be raked up and put once more
together by conjunction or collation. But
there has been nothing to disturb the
reminiscences and traditions of the race of Uri
And when they point to the site of Tell's
house, or Tell's village, I, for one, no more
doubt the correct indication of the fresh
omitenance and steady finger, than if old
Tell himself were the cicerone, who tells us
the story.

The canton of Uri consists of the one
great valley of the Reuss, which emerges
from the Furka and the waters of the St.
Grothard. It once evidently formed an
immense mountain-lake, at the foot of the St.
Gothard, till a convulsion of nature and its
own force enabled it to break through a
rocky barrier, amidst the ruins of which
stands the Devil's Bridge. The river runs for
seventeen or twenty miles down to the lake,
forming an angle at Amsteg, and pent in on
Both sides by mountains of the greatest
height. About a league before reaching the
extremity of the valley, on the falling of the
river into the lake, a lateral valley opens
perpendicular to the great one, and to the
right as one descends. This valley is of
small depth and extent, very soon rising into
the mountain, which may be traversed to the
summit, and which leads into a corresponding
valley of Schwytz. The chief man of the
Little valley, that is, the man with the largest
farm and the most cattle, was William Tell.
Of course the little valley is formed by a
mountain stream. This about half a mile
up makes a bound; and on and about
its fall stands the village of Burglein. Those
who visit it from Altorf ought to be
directed by a foot-path, which runs along a
mill-stream, and leads through chestnut groves
and wooden cottages, to the chapel erected
to the honour of Tell, on the site of his house.
The church is large, with a tall white steeple
and a red top to it. The pilgrimage of every
traveller to Burglein is indispensable; yet
the villagers seem not to have invented an
efficient mode of levying black mail, although
the view from the churchyard is one of the
finest in the valley. The village is now,
especially in the day-time, noisy with visitors,
with children, and with sawing-mills, that
take advantage of every fall in the stream.
Of evenings it is more primitive, when the
mill ceases, and the church begins its Ave
Maria; for Uri is a strictly Catholic canton,
as the fine convent over Altorf sufficiently
attests. The monks remain still the sole
aristocracy of the district. The Franciscans,
with their cowls on or off their heads, look
picturesque in boats in the flush of evening
on the calm lake; sometimes going on ghostly
errands, with an awning and certain symptoms
of their paraphernalia and profession.
Such sights are growing rare throughout
Europe: it is in few places the traveller meets
with them. Besides the convent at Altorf,
there is a splendid monastery high up in the
valley of the Unterwalden; it is called the
Engelberg. These monasteries are poorer than
they were; for monks are like other landlords:
they can live on their rents in rich districts, as
did the monks of Thergovia and Argovia,
till the radicals secularised them; but in