spired by the climate, whilst the
varieties which the forms of government, including religion, produce are
much more numerous and unstable.

A people have been characterised as stupid by nature; what a paradox!
because they did not consider that slaves, having no object to stimulate
industry; have not their faculties sharpened by the only thing that can
exercise them, self-interest. Others have been brought forward as
brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and sciences, only because the
progress of improvement had not reached that stage which produces them.

Those writers who have considered the history of man, or of the human
mind, on a more enlarged scale have fallen into similar errors, not
reflecting that the passions are weak where the necessaries of life are
too hardly or too easily obtained.

Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native
country, had better stay at home. It is, for example, absurd to blame a
people for not having that degree of personal cleanliness and elegance of
manners which only refinement of taste produces, and will produce
everywhere in proportion as society attains a general polish. The most
essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would
be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical
assertions which only appear calculated to gird the human mind round with
imaginary circles, like the paper globe which represents the one he
inhabits.

This spirit of inquiry is the characteristic of the present century, from
which the succeeding will, I am persuaded, receive a great accumulation
of knowledge; and doubtless its diffusion will in a great measure destroy
the factitious national characters which have been supposed permanent,
though only rendered so by the permanency of ignorance.

Arriving at Fredericshall, at the siege of which Charles XII. lost his
life, we had only time to take a transient view of it whilst they were
preparing us some refreshment.

Poor Charles! I thought of him with respect. I have always felt the
same for Alexander, with whom he has been classed as a madman by several
writers, who have reasoned superficially, confounding the morals of the
day with the few grand principles on which unchangeable morality rests.
Making no allowance for the ignorance and prejudices of the period, they
do not perceive how much they themselves are indebted to general
improvement for the acquirements, and even