I consider myself exceptionally fortunate in having lived at a time when modern conveniences of transport were already in existence, but had not yet produced their inevitable results.  It is quite sufficiently obvious that national customs and national peculiarities are being smoothed out of existence by facilities of travel.  My father and mother, early in their married life, drove from London to Naples in their own carriage, the journey occupying over a month.  They left their own front door in London, had their carriage placed on the deck of the Channel steamer, sat in it during the passage (what a singularly uncomfortable resting-place it must have been should they have encountered bad weather!), and continued their journey on the other side.  During their leisurely progress through France and Italy, they must have enjoyed opportunities of studying the real life of these countries which are denied the passengers in a rapide, jammed in amongst a cosmopolitan crew in the prosaic atmosphere of dining and sleeping cars, and scarcely bestowing a passing glance on the country through which they are being whirled.  Even in my time I have seen marked changes, and have witnessed the gradual disappearance of national costumes, and of national types of architecture.  Every capital in Europe seems to adopt in its modern buildings a standardised type of architecture.  No sojourner in any of the big modern hotels, which bear such a wearisome family likeness to each other, could tell in which particular country he might happen to find himself, were it not for the scraps of conversation which reach his ears, for the externals all look alike, and even the cooking has, with a greater or less degree of success, been standardised to the requisite note of monotony.  Travellers may be divided into two categories:  those who wish to find on foreign soil the identical conditions to which they have been accustomed at home, and those searching for novelty of outlook and novelty of surroundings.  The former will welcome the process of planing down national idiosyncrasies into one dead level of uniformity of type, the latter will deplore it; but this, like many other things, is a matter of individual taste.

The ousting of the splendid full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred, is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque.  In twenty-five years’ time, every one will be living in a drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated.  I am lucky in having seen some of it.