PREFACE 



If anyone will be at the pains to look back twenty years, 

 and compare the amount of foreign travel in which our. 

 countrymen at that date indulged with the touring which 

 prevails at present, he can hardly fail to be surprised at 

 the enormous, rapid, and continued rate of increase in 

 the development of what now may almost be called a 

 passion of the English nation. 



The immediate cause which has so violently excited 

 British restlessness, and so vehemently promoted foreign 

 travel, has unquestionably been the extension of railways, 

 which now form a network over the principal portions of 

 Europe, and which offer such great facilities to tourists ; 

 and which, by diminishing the inconveniences and fatigue 

 of travel, have, to a great extent, annihilated time and 

 space, and enabled the infirm, the delicate, and even the 

 confirmed invalid, to encounter distant journe3^s, without 

 alarm at the demands on physical endurance, which even 

 a slight trip used formerly to entail. 



Hence, the Continent of Europe is not only inundated 

 during the summer and autumn with vast troops of 

 pleasure-seekers, who systematically court healthy re- 

 laxation for mind and body amid foreign scenes, and for 

 which I, for one, heartily commend the good taste of my 

 countrymen ; but there are also periodical migrations of 



