onspicuous of ancient travellers.
But travelling, either for business or pleasure, among the moderns, dates
from the era of the Crusades. The barriers of the East were once again
thrown open by that general ferment in the European world. Piety, the
passion of enterprise, the dawning instincts of commerce, a new thirst
for exotic luxuries, all contributed to inspire a desire for exploring
the seats of the most ancient civilization. To this desire and to its
effects we owe some of the most graphic and entertaining of modern
writings. If we were, through any misadventure, sent to jail, we would
stipulate for permission to carry into our cell Hakluyt's Voyages. The
narratives of modern travellers are often learned, more often flimsy, and
from the universality of locomotion, much given, like the prayers of the
old Pharisees, to tedious repetitions. A tour in Greece or Italy now
affects us with unutterable weariness. A journey from London to York
affords more real novelty than many of these excursions. Sir Charles
Fellows or Mr. Layard write in the spirit of the old travellers, and we
would willingly wander any-whither with George Borrow. But, for the most
part, the art of writing travels is lost--its imaginativeness, its
credulity, its cherishing of mystery, and its proneness to awe. The old
travellers are never sentimental--and sentiment is the very bane of
road-books,--and they never describe for description's sake. The world
was much too wonderful in their eyes for such unprofitable excursions of
fancy. Beauty and danger, difficulty and strangeness, novel fashions and
unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect
of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to
them "as a banner broad unfurled," and inscribed with mystic signs and
legends. They were not whirled about from place to place: they had
leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in
perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery;
they journeyed with their lives in their hands, and were often
yoke-fellows with hunger and nakedness, and the fury of the elements.
Luckily for us who read their narratives, they were most unscientific,
and ascribed the howling of the night-wind, the bursting of icebergs, the
noise of tempests, and the echoes that traverse boundless plains after
great heats, or are imprisoned in rock and fell, to the voice of demons
exulting or la