exercised in clearing
the thoroughfares of these unconscionable barriers. It was a costly
day's journey to ride through the domain of a lord abbot or an acred
baron. The bridge, the ferry, the hostelry, the causeway across the
marshes, had each its several perquisite. Exportation from abroad was
oftener cheaper than production at home. It answered better to import
cloth from Flanders than to weave and bring it from York: and land
carriage from Norwich to London was nearly as burdensome as
water-carriage from Lisbon. Coals, manure, grain, minerals, and leather
were transported on the backs of cattle. An ambassador going or
returning from abroad was followed by as numerous a retinue as if he had
ridden forth conquering and to conquer. Nor were his followers merely
for state or ceremony, but indispensable to his comfort, since the horses
and mules which bore his suite carried also the furniture of his bed-room
and kitchen, owing to the clumsiness of wheel-carriages. If, as was
sometimes the case, a great lord carried half an estate on his back, he
often consumed the other half in equipping and feeding his train: and
among the pleasures utterly unknown to the world for more than five
thousand years is, that both peer and peasant may now travel from
Middlesex to any portion of the known world with only an umbrella and
carpet-bag.

We have alluded in our sketch of the earliest roads to the general
character of early travelling; but a few words in connection with roads
remain to be said on that subject. Travelling for pleasure--taking what
our grandfathers were wont to call the _Grand Tour_--were recreations
almost unknown to the ancient world. If Plato went into Egypt, it was
not to ascend the Nile, nor to study the monumental pictures of a land
whose history was graven on rocks, but to hold close colloquy on
metaphysics or divinity with the Dean and Chapter at Memphis. The Greeks
indeed, fortunately for posterity, had an incredible itch for Egyptian
yarns, and no sooner had King Psammetichus given them a general
invitation to the Delta, than they flocked thither from Athens and
Smyrna, and Cos and Sparta, and the parts of Italy about Thurium, with
their heads full of very particular questions, and often, to judge by
their reports of what they heard, with ears particularly open to any
answers the Egyptian clergy might please to give. Yet pleasure was not
the object of their journey. Science, as themselves said,