countenance, if it be
wrinkled either with smiles or with frowns, is to be shunned; the furrows
which the latter leave show that the soil is sour, those of the former
are symptomatic of a hollow heart.

None of your travellers have reached Utopia, and brought from thence a
fuller account of its institutions?

_Montesinos_.--There was one, methinks, who must have had it in view when
he walked over the world to discover the source of moral motion. He was
afflicted with a tympany of mind produced by metaphysics, which was at
that time a common complaint, though attended in him with unusual
symptoms, but his heart was healthy and strong, and might in former ages
have enabled him to acquire a distinguished place among the saints of the
Thebais or the philosophers of Greece.

But although we have now no travellers employed in seeking undiscoverable
countries, and although Eldorado, the city of the Cesares, and the
Sabbatical River, are expunged even from the maps of credulity and
imagination, Welshmen have gone in search of Madoc's descendants, and
scarcely a year passes without adding to the melancholy list of those who
have perished in exploring the interior of Africa.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Whenever there shall exist a civilised and Christian
negro state Providence will open that country to civilisation and
Christianity, meantime to risk strength and enterprise and science
against climate is contending against the course of nature. Have these
travellers yet obtained for you the secret of the Psylli?

_Montesinos_.--We have learnt from savages the mode of preparing their
deadliest poisons. The more useful knowledge by which they render the
human body proof against the most venomous serpents has not been sought
with equal diligence; there are, however, scattered notices which may
perhaps afford some clue to the discovery. The writings of travellers
are not more rich in materials for the poet and the historian than they
are in useful notices, deposited there like seeds which lie deep in the
earth till some chance brings them within reach of air, and then they
germinate. These are fields in which something may always be found by
the gleaner, and therefore those general collections in which the works
are curtailed would be to be reprobated, even if epitomisers did not seem
to possess a certain instinct of generic doltishness which leads them
curiously to omit whatever ought especially to be preserved.

_Sir Thomas Mor