The father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild was in the habit of saying, that “travelling was travelling in one part of the world as well as another; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in traversing so many leagues; and he appealed to experience whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland.”  Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows; but we think he told no more than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe.  They go out empty, to come home unprofitably full.  They go abroad to escape themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to jump away from their own shadows.  And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the dullest place.  If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the “Tristia,” had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getae which he learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable than all his poems.  Could men only learn how comfortably the world can get along without the various information which they bring home about themselves!  Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than exactness.  Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two kinds of men only,—­those of the highest genius and culture, and those wholly without either.

It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to that end.  The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere diarist, Pepys; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot down the events of every day for one’s self without thinking of Mrs. Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court to her.  One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen should be tolerably easy; but in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does not the tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he ought to have experienced, instead of letting us know what he saw and felt?  If authors would only consider that the way to write an enlivening book is not by seeing and saying just what would be expected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public would be gainers.  What tortures have we not seen the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to get up the appropriate emotion before some famous work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to escape!  If one does not like the Venus of Milo, let him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never will.