pursuit of speculative truth in Germany, philanthropic enterprise in
France, love of freedom in Switzerland, popular education in China,
domestic purity in Norway,--each of these great moral beauties is a star
on the forehead of a nation. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly
united. The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over; and the
good the least. It may be taken as a rule that the best qualities of a
people, as of an individual, are the most characteristic--(what is
really _best_ being tested, not by prejudice, but principle). He has the
best chance of ascertaining these best qualities who has them in
himself; and he who has them not may as well pretend to give a picture
of a metropolitan city by showing a map of its drainage, as report of a
nation after an intercourse with its knaves and its profligates. To
stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate
general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city.

CHAPTER III.

MECHANICAL REQUISITES.

"He travels and expatiates, as the bee
From flower to flower, so he from land to land:
The manners, customs, policy, of all
Pay contribution to the stores he gleans."--_The Task._

"Thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly falsely, must
needs be granted to be much at one."--_King Henry V._

No philosophical or moral fitness will qualify a traveller to observe a
people if he does not select a mode of travelling which will enable him
to see and converse with a great number and variety of persons. An
ambassador has no chance of learning much of the people he visits
anywhere but in a new country like America. While he is _en route_, he
is too stately in appearance to allow of any familiarity on the part of
the people by the road-side. His carriages might almost as well roll
through a city of the dead, for anything he will learn from intercourse
with the living. The case is not much better when a family or a party of
friends travel together on the Continent, committing the business of the
expedition to servants, and shrinking from intercourse, on all social
occasions, with English shyness or pride.

The behaviour of the English on the Continent has become a matter of
very serious consequence to the best informed and best mannered of their
countrymen, as it has long been to the natives into whose society they
may happen to fall. I have heard gentlemen say that they lose half their
ple