revolution.  A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould’s private planets.—­Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—­Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—­which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality.  There was a story about “strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny to us fellows—­on the road from Milan to Venice.—­Coelum, non animum,—­travellers change their guineas, but not their characters.  The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—­Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other.—­A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under “the great elm,” and forget all about Egypt.  When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase, “reductio ad absurdum”; the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.  Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, “a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

——­Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects more than one in full costume.

  “Is this the mighty ocean?—­is this all?”

says the Princess in Gebir.  The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come.  But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s Mistress in her stone girdle—­alta maenia Romae—­rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont.  The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace.  These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls.  It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the