a valuable because a rather uncommon view, and as a literary record of
travel it is distinguished by a very exceptional veracity.

I am not prepared to define the differentia of a really first-rate book
of travel. Sympathy is important; but not indispensable, or Smollett
would be ruled out of court at once. Scientific knowledge, keen
observation, or intuitive power of discrimination go far. To enlist our
curiosity or enthusiasm or to excite our wonder are even stronger
recommendations. Charm of personal manner, power of will,
anthropological interest, self-effacement in view of some great
objects--all these qualities have made travel-books live. One knows
pretty nearly the books that one is prepared to re-read in this
department of literature. Marco Polo, Herodotus, a few sections in
Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the early travellers in Palestine,
Commodore Byron's Travels, Curzon and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta,
Mungo Park, Dubois, Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of
Borrow (fact or fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and
Wallace, The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of
Modestine, The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I
have run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would
not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding works on
the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should we say, better
dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is good reason to hope, is
only one of suspended animation.

To come to surer ground, it is a fact worth noting that each of the
four great prose masters of the third quarter of the eighteenth century
tried his hand at a personal record of travel. Fielding came first in
1754 with his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Twelve years later was
published Smollett's Travels through France and Italy. Then, in 1768,
Sterne's Sentimental Journey; followed in 1775 by Johnson's Journey to
the Hebrides. Each of the four--in which beneath the apparel of the man
of letters we can discern respectively the characteristics of police
magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist--enjoyed a fair amount of
popularity in its day. Fielding's Journal had perhaps the least
immediate success of the four. Sterne's Journey unquestionably had the
most. The tenant of "Shandy Hall," as was customary in the first heyday
of "Anglomania," went to Paris to ratify his successes, and the
resounding triumph of his naughtiness ther