Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from travelling-companions whose only notion of their function was that of putting so many leagues a day behind them.  His theory was that of Ulysses, who was not content with seeing the cities of many men, but would learn their minds also.  And this way of taking time enough, while we think it the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a country so much the reverse of _ fast_ as Italy, where impressions need to steep themselves in the sun and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem should be translated take your own time.  But is there any particular reason why everybody should go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell everybody else what he supposes he ought to have seen there?  Surely, there must be some adequate cause for so constant an effect.

Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that, if he could only see Rome, “it would give him talk for a lifetime.”  The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass “four months on classic ground,” after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conciva satur,—­a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense.  We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible predilection.  But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself.  Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature.  The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome; the Englishman, because the same Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him a Milor in partibus.  But to the American, especially if he be of an imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm.  She gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner.  In England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French; but Rome is the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Florus.  Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living,