Twelve Bad Women contains much interesting matter, but, on the whole, it is depressing.  It seems very dull to be bad.  Perhaps the editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded.  Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these courtesans and criminals put together.  The note of jollity is entirely absent.  It was no primrose path these unhappy women traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were unchristian to doubt.  The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is in a third, for it has a moral tendency.

ITINERARIES

Anyone who is teased by the notion that it would be pleasant to be remembered, in the sense of being read, after death, cannot do better to secure that end than compose an Itinerary and leave it behind him in manuscript, with his name legibly inscribed thereon.  If an honest bit of work, noting distances, detailing expenses, naming landmarks, moors, mountains, harbours, docks, buildings—­indeed, anything which, as lawyers say, savours of realty—­and but scantily interspersed with reflections, and with no quotations, why, then, such a piece of work, however long publication may be delayed—­and a century or two will not matter in the least—­cannot fail, whenever it is printed, to attract attention, to excite general interest and secure a permanent hold in every decent library in the kingdom.

Time cannot stale an Itinerary. Iter, Via, Actus are words of pith and moment.  Stage-coaches, express trains, motor-cars, have written, or are now writing, their eventful histories over the face of these islands; but, whatever changes they have made or are destined to make, they have left untouched the mystery of the road, although for the moment the latest comer may seem injuriously to have affected its majesty.

The Itinerist alone among authors is always sure of an audience.  No matter where, no matter when, he has but to tell us how he footed it and what he saw by the wayside, and we must listen.  How can we help it?  Two hundred years ago, it may be, this Itinerist came through our village, passed by the wall of our homestead, climbed our familiar hill, and went on his way; it is perhaps but two lines and a half he can afford to give us, but what lines they are!  How different with sermons, poems, and novels!  On each of these is the stamp of the author’s age; sentiments, fashions, thoughts, faiths, phraseology, all worn out—­cold, dirty grate, where once there was a blazing fire.  Cheerlessness personified!  Leland’s anti-Papal treatise in forty-five chapters remains in learned custody—­a manuscript; a publisher it will never find.  We still have Papists and anti-Papists; in this case the fire still blazes, but the grates are of an entirely different