rs, the ladies have kindly stepped in to supply the
deficiency; and numerous works have issued from the press, from the
pens of the most accomplished and distinguished of our aristocratic
beauties. But alas! there is no royal road to literature, any more
than geometry. Almack's and the exclusives, the opera and ducal
houses, the lordlings and the guards, form an admirable school for
manners, and are an indispensable preliminary to success at courts and
coronations, in ball-rooms and palaces. But the world is not made up
of courts or palaces, of kings or princes, of dukes or marquesses. Men
have something more to think of than the reception which the great
world of one country gives to the great world of another--of the balls
to which they are invited, or the fetes which they grace by their
charms--or the privations to which elegant females, nursed in the lap
of luxury, are exposed in roughing it amidst the snows of the North or
the deserts of the South. We are grateful to the lady travellers for
the brilliant and interesting pictures they have given us of capitals
and manners,[3] of costume and dress, and of many eminent men and
women, whom their rank and sex gave them peculiar opportunities of
portraying. But we can scarcely congratulate the country upon having
found in them a substitute for learned and accomplished travellers of
the other sex; or formed a set-off on the part of Great Britain, to
the Humboldts, the Chateaubriands, and Lamartines of continental
Europe.

It is impossible to contemplate the works of these great men without
arriving at the conclusion, that it is in the varied and discursive
education of the Continent, that a foundation has been laid for the
extraordinary eminence which its travellers have attained. It is the
vast number of subjects with which the young men are in some degree
made acquainted at the German universities, which has rendered them so
capable in after life of travelling with advantage in any quarter of
the globe, and writing their travels with effect. This advantage is in
a peculiar manner conspicuous in HUMBOLDT, whose mind, naturally
ardent and capacious, had been surprisingly enlarged and extended by
early and various study in the most celebrated German universities. He
acquired, in consequence, so extraordinary a command of almost every
department of physical and political science, that there is hardly any
branch of it in which facts of importance may not be found in his
tra