90 Travels in France 



me. Between the town and that place are a great number of 

 neat httle houses, built with each its garden, and one or two 

 fields enclosed of most wretched blowing dune sand, naturally 

 as white as snow, but improved by industry. The magic of 

 PROPERTY turns sand to gold. — 18 miles. 



8///. Leave Dunkirk, where the Concierge, a good inn, as 

 indeed I have found all in Flanders. Pass Gravelline, which, to 

 my unlearned eyes, seems the strongest place I have yet seen, at 

 least the works above ground are more numerous than at any 

 other. Ditches, ramparts, and drawbridges without end. This 

 is a part of the art military I like : it implies defence and leaving 

 rascality to neighbours. If Gengischan or Tamerlane had met 

 with such places as Gravelline or Lisle in their way, where would 

 their conquests and extirpations of the human race have been? — 

 Reach Calais. And here ends a journey which has given me a 

 great deal of pleasure, and more information than I should have 

 expected in a kingdom not so well cultivated as our owti. It 

 has been the first of my foreign travels; and has with me con- 

 firmed the idea that to know our own country well we must see 

 something of others. Nations figure by comparison ; and those 

 ought to be esteemed the benefactors of the human race who 

 have most established public prosperity on the basis of private 

 happiness. To ascertain how far this has been the case v/ith the 

 French has been one material object of my tour. It is an 

 inquiry of great range and no trifling complexity; but a single 

 excursion is too little to trust to. I must come again and again 

 before I venture conclusions.— 25 miles. 



Wait at Desseins three days for a wind (the Duke and 

 Duchess of Gloucester are in the same inn and situation) and 

 for a packet. A captain behaved shabbily: deceived me, and 

 was hired by a family that would admit nobody but themselves: 

 I did not ask what nation this family was of. — Dover — London 

 — Bradfield;— and have more pleasure in giving my little girl a 

 French doll than in viewing Versailles. 



