f water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all.
we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a
hundred and fifty years after his death.

[Footnote B: _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. VIII., p. 765.]

One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr.
Russell's book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after
the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one
on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as
he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see
countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall
pay his travelling-charges. The object which men formerly proposed to
themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out
something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way
either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,--and they treated of
manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and
impartiality of naturalists: They did not conclude things to be
necessarily worse because they were different. A modern Tom Coryat,
instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would
find some excuse for thinking the Italians a _nasty_ people because they
used it. In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a traveller
was to discover (or where that failed, to invent) all that he possibly
can to the disadvantage of the country he visits; and he is so
scrupulous a censor of individual manners that he has no eyes left for
national characteristics. Another striking difference between the older
traveller and his modern successor is that the observer and the object
to be observed seem to have reversed their relations to each other, so
that the man, with his sensations, prejudices, and annoyances, fills up
the greater part of the book, while the foreign country becomes merely
incidental, a sort of canvas, on which his own portrait is to be painted
for the instruction of his readers. Pliny used to say that something was
to be learned from the worst book; and accordingly let us be thankful to
the voyagers of the last thirty years that they have taught us where
we can get the toughest steak and the coldest coffee which this world
offers to the diligent seeker after wisdom, and have made us intimately
acquainted with the peculiarities of the fleas, if with those of none
of the other dwellers in every corner of the globe. Su