A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in
a foreign country should always know two things,--_what_ he is, and
_where_ he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even
Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking
of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a
great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all.
we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a
hundred and fifty years after his death.
[Footnote B: _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. VIII., p. 765.]
One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr.
Russell's book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after
the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one
on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as
he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see
countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall
pay his travelling-charges. The object which men formerly proposed to
themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out
something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way
either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,--and they treated of
manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and
impartiality of naturalists: They did not conclude things to be
necessarily worse because they were different.
Pages:
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308