ir return
that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland."
Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind
of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows; but we think he told no more
than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people
who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their
memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe. They go out
empty, to come home unprofitably full. They go abroad to escape
themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to
jump away from their own shadows. And yet even the dullest man, if he
went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the
dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the "Tristia,"
had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getae which he
learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable
than all his poems. Could men only learn how comfortably the world can
get along without the various information which they bring home about
themselves! Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear,
to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are
spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than
exactness. Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like
facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much
more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter
than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep
into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and
he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two
kinds of men only,--those of the highest genius and culture, and those
wholly without either.

It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done
with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to
that end. The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere
diarist, Pepys; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot
down the events of every day for one's self without thinking of Mrs.
Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and
not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court
to her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen
should be tolerably easy; but in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does
not the tourist bore us with the