f observing Morals and Manners.
Impossible as it may be to attain to an adequate expression of one's
self in a foreign tongue, it is easy to most persons to learn to
understand it perfectly when spoken by others. During this process, a
common and almost unavoidable mistake is to suppose a too solemn and
weighty meaning in what is expressed in an unfamiliar language. This
arises partly from our having become first acquainted with the language
in books; and partly from the meaning having been attained with effort,
and seeming, by natural association, worth the pains. The first French
dialogues which a child learns, seem more emphatic in their meanings
than the same material would in English; and the student of German finds
a grandeur in lines of Schiller, and in clauses of Herder's and
Krummacher's Parables, which he looks for in vain when he is practised
in the language. It is well to bear this in mind on a first entrance
into a foreign society, or the traveller may chance to detect himself
treasuring up nonsense, and making much of mere trivialities, because
they reached him clothed in the mystery of a strange language. He will
be like lame Jervas, when he first came up from the mine in which he was
born, caressing the weeds he had gathered by the road side, and refusing
till the last moment to throw away such wonderful and beautiful things.
The raw traveller not only sees something mysterious, picturesque, or
classical in every object that meets his eye after passing the frontier,
from the children's toys to palaces and general festivals, but is apt to
discern wisdom and solemnity in everything that is said to him, from the
greeting of the landlord to the speculations of the politician. If not
guarded against, this natural tendency will more or less vitiate the
observer's first impressions, and introduce something of the ludicrous
into his record of them.

From the consideration of the requisites for observation in the
traveller himself, we now proceed to indicate what he is to observe, in
order to inform himself of foreign Morals and Manners.

PART II.

WHAT TO OBSERVE.

"Nous nous en tiendrons aux moeurs, aux habitudes exterieures
dont se forme, pour les differentes classes de la societe, une
sorte de physionomie morale, ou se retracent les moeurs
privees." DE JOUY.

It is a perpetual wonder to an inexperienced person that the students of
particular clas