506 ENGLAND AND HER CRITICS. 



emendation, always with a reverent respect for truth ; and the candid 

 observations of a mind, so actuated and so endued, will inevitably 

 achieve in their eventual extension, a proportionate degree of sound 

 and permanent improvement. The travels of such a man must in- 

 fallibly benefit the countries he may visit, as well as the native soil 

 from which he was solicited by the external objects of a commendable 

 curiosity. Let the traveller be unlettered even if his perceptions be 

 but just, his sense of right and wrong correct; if he possess but an 

 inquiring and observant spirit; if the result of his researches be de- 

 livered with impartiality and candour free at once from the distor- 

 tions of dislike and the accommodation of seductive prepossession 

 such a man, we say, must work a portion of advantage to the country 

 where his travels are performed, as well as to the native home to 

 which he brings the accumulation of a vigilant experience. 



Let us, on the other hand, suppose a traveller of other purposes 

 and qualities let us imagine a person of immeasurable insignificance 

 as to talents, both acquired and natural ; slavish in his prejudice, and 

 faulty in his predilections ; squeamish, ignorant, envious and peevish ; 

 destitute of intuition, prone to detraction ; hasty in opinion, and shal- 

 low in his judgment ; studious of every minor fault, and utterly in- 

 sensible or blind to every worthy quality. Let us look on this offen- 

 sive mixture of falsehood, jealousy, and rnisconstructive spleen ; 

 tortured at the evidence of a foreign nation's grandeur, a specimen at 

 once of conscious inferiority and of fretful rancour ; striving, by every 

 art of disingenuous hesitation, to question undeniable excellence by 

 distortion to disfigure facts, which scowl defiance on his impotent ma- 

 lignity ; to stigmatize, by sweeping slanders, the orders of a State that 

 shed the sneer of a serene contempt on the abortive efforts of his puny 

 hatred ; endeavouring, by the inversion of all usage, to establish rules 

 as the exceptions, and the exceptions as the rules, of his silly and un- 

 candid estimate; let us add, to all these fruitful qualities, the crowning 

 honour of unbounded egotism, and we shall not be much surprised 

 to find that such a person, much below the mediocrity of that com- 

 munity in which he moved, should prove resentful of his own degree, 

 and, with a view to vindicate the tortured vanity of disabused preten- 

 sion, strive to vilify, with flippant impudence and gross untruth, the 

 national and moral grandeur he beheld but to detest and to decry. 



Such, we are compelled to say is in the present day the character 

 of many vagabond lampooners, who conceive it quite sufficient to 

 have rolled a thousand miles through any country of the universe, to 

 be enabled to present a picture of its manners, morals, government, 

 and institutions. Without the slightest previous preparation on the 

 subject, they throw themselves upon a world of most revolting novelties; 

 are launched into the intercourse of mixed descriptions ; acquire, in 

 general, their information from the casul occupants of public coaches, 

 the chance acquaintance of an inn, or the infallible dogmatism of some 

 contemptible itinerary ; with infinite absurdity they regard the surly 

 rudeness of some wealthy grazier, manufacturer, or farmer, or the half- 

 French frippery of an occasional man-milliner, as the common traits 

 of national society ; and, applying to the purposes of predisposed vi- 

 tuperation all the fractious acrimony of stage-coach politics, each 



