like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged
separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
beauties of Nature.

'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
but satisfies no heart.'

This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.

The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
rather isolated in