in North America. 4-9 1 



" Oft has it been my lot to mark 

 A proud, conceited, talking spark, 

 With eyes that hardly served at most 

 To guard their master 'gainst a post, 

 Yet round the world the blade has been. 

 To see whatever could be seen." 



And I am aware you once witnessed an instance where 

 travelling appeared rather to have made the person " lisp, 

 wear strange suits, and disabled him from receiving the bene- 

 fits of his own country." You have seen a fop " grown so 

 fast as e'er he could " from the day he commenced his foreign 

 visits ; but, my young friend, if I thought myself destined to 

 become such a creature, or that you think me a likely subject 

 to be thus influenced, and that my travelling is not a matter 

 of need, I would immediately turn my unfortunate footsteps 

 homeward, and for ever afterwards confine them to the pur- 

 lieus of my father's inheritance, or the precincts of the good 

 sabbath-day's walk of old. Dr. Watts, you may recollect, 

 says, " Nothing tends so much to enlarge the mind as tra- 

 velling ; that is, making a visit to other towns, cities, or coun- 

 tries, besides those in which we were born and educated." 

 Shakspeare, in relation to the same subject, speaks thus : — 



" Let him spend his time no more at home. 

 Which would be great impeachment to his age, 

 In having known no travel in his youth." 



The father of English philosophy. Bacon, observes : " Tra- 

 vel in the younger sort is a part of education ; in the elder, a 

 part of experience." Addison remarks, that " a man not 

 enlightened by travel or reflection grows as fond of arbitrary 

 power, to which he hath been used, as of barren countries, in 

 which he has been born and bred." To urge my theme fur- 

 ther would be impeaching your taste and judgment. 



I am now on my passage up the Hudson River, on board 

 the packet-sloop Neptune. We have a fair and rather brisk 

 wind, with every appearance of a thunder storm. 



The Hudson, or North River, as it is here more generally 

 called, between the ferries of New York and New Jersey, is 

 one mile in breadth ; but the quays, and other contrivances 

 of man, have evidently encroached upon the natural bound- 

 aries of the water, as the river abruptly expands immediately 

 above and below the city. For some distance up, this river 

 forms the line of division between the States of New York and 

 New Jersey. The shore and land on the Jersey side, directly 

 opposite New York, affords only an indifferent landscape, 

 having little else to attract the eye than a few houses scattered 

 here and there on some sand hills : a tree or vegetation of any 



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