schools of Greece were still pursuing the
beaten paths, and teaching the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. It is
the peculiar and prodigious advantage of travelling, that it
counteracts this woful and degrading tendency, and by directing men's
thoughts, as well as their steps, into foreign lands, has a tendency
to induce into their ideas a portion of the variety and freshness
which characterize the works of nature. Every person knows how great
an advantage this proves in society. All must have felt what a relief
it is to escape from the eternal round of local concerns or county
politics, of parish grievances or neighbouring railroads, with which
in every-day life we are beset, to the conversation of a person of
intelligence who has visited foreign lands, and can give to the
inquisitive at home a portion of the new ideas, images, and
recollections with which his mind is stored. How, then, has it
happened, that the same acquaintance with foreign and distant
countries, which is universally felt to be such an advantage in
conversation, is attended with such opposite effects in literature;
and that, while our travellers are often the most agreeable men in
company, they are beyond all question the dullest in composition?

Much of this extraordinary and woful deficiency, we are persuaded, is
owing to the limited range of objects to which the education of the
young of the higher classes is so exclusively directed in Oxford and
Cambridge. Greek and Latin, Aristotle's logic and classical
versification, quadratic equations, conic sections, the differential
calculus, are very good things, and we are well aware that it is by
excellence in them that the highest honours in these seminaries of
learning can alone be attained. They are essential to the fame of a
Parr or a Porson, a Herschel or a Whewell. But a very different
species of mental training is required for advantageous travelling.
Men will soon find that neither Greek prose nor Latin prose, Greek
verse nor Latin verse, will avail them when they come to traverse the
present states of the world. The most thorough master of the higher
mathematics will find his knowledge of scarce any avail in Italy or
Egypt, the Alps or the Andes. These acquisitions are doubtless among
the greatest triumphs of the human understanding, and they are
calculated to raise a few, perhaps one in a hundred, to distinction in
classical or scientific pursuits; but upon the minds of the remaining
ninety-n