An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien Regime.And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own landscapes.A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with the prince's game; a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins; and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its French fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood likewise, which the prince has partially paid for, by selling a few hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees.The river, too, is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was blown up in the Seven Years' War; and there is but a single lazy barge floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene Highness;the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.
How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic beauty of the scene destroyed;--to have steamers puffing up and down the river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old World, in exchange for the wealth of the New--or hurrying, it may be, whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they know for what.How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists, and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure.How sad to see the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a new crucifix by the wayside.How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the land they till has become their own, and not the prince's; while their sons are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West.Very unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety, cleanliness and comfort.But they possess advantages unknown to the Ancien Regime, which was, if nothing else, picturesque.Men could paint amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and its places.
