s the
author passed a bad night? the reader is sure to know it on the
following morning. On the other hand, has he had a good night's rest
in a comfortable bed? [dans un lit _comfortable_?] We are as sure to
know this also, as soon as he awakes:--and thus far we are relieved
from anxiety about the health of the traveller. Cold and heat--fine
weather and bad weather--every variation of atmosphere is scrupulously
recorded.

What immediately follows, is unworthy of M. Licquet; because it not only
implies a charge of a heinous description--accusing me of an insidious
intrusion into domestic circles, a violation of confidence, and a
systematic derision of persons and things--but because the French
translator, exercising that sense and shrewdness which usually distinguish
him, MUST have known that such a charge _could_ not have been founded in
FACT. He must have known that any gentleman, leaving England with those
letters which brought me in contact with some of the first circles on the
Continent, MUST have left it without leaving his character _behind_ him;
and that such a character could not, in the natural order of things--seen
even through the sensitive medium of a French critic--have been guilty of
the grossness and improprieties imputed to me by M. Licquet. I treat
therefore this "damnation in wholesale" with scorn and contempt: and hasten
to impress the reader with a more favourable opinion of my Norman
translator. He _will_ have it that

"the English Traveller's imagination is lively and ardent--and his
spirit, that of raillery and lightness. He examines as he runs along;
that is to say, he does not give himself time to examine; he examines
ill; he deceives himself; and he subjects his readers to be deceived
with him. He traverses, at a hard trot, one of the most ancient towns
in France; puts his head out of his carriage window--and boldly
decides that the town is of the time of Francis I."![9] p. xviij.

There is pleasantry, and perhaps some little truth, in this vein of
observation; and it had been better, perhaps, for the credit of the good
taste and gentleman-like feeling of Mons. Licquet, if he had uniformly
maintained his character in these respects. I have however, in the
subsequent pages,[10] occasionally grappled with my annotator in proving
the fallacy, or the want of charity, of many of his animadversions: and the
reader probably may not be displease