is confused together.  There are Frenchmen in every corner of the globe.  In no country of the world do you find more people who have travelled than in France.  And yet of all the nations of Europe, that which has seen most, knows least.  The English are also travellers, but they travel in another fashion; these two nations must always be at opposite extremes.  The English nobility travels, the French stays at home; the French people travel, the English stay at home.  This difference does credit, I think, to the English.  The French almost always travel for their own ends; the English do not seek their fortune in other lands, unless in the way of commerce and with their hands full; when they travel it is to spend their money, not to live by their wits; they are too proud to cringe before strangers.  This is why they learn more abroad than the French who have other fish to fry.  Yet the English have their national prejudices; but these prejudices are not so much the result of ignorance as of feeling.  The Englishman’s prejudices are the result of pride, the Frenchman’s are due to vanity.

Just as the least cultivated nations are usually the best, so those travel best who travel least; they have made less progress than we in our frivolous pursuits, they are less concerned with the objects of our empty curiosity, so that they give their attention to what is really useful.  I hardly know any but the Spaniards who travel in this fashion.  While the Frenchman is running after all the artists of the country, while the Englishman is getting a copy of some antique, while the German is taking his album to every man of science, the Spaniard is silently studying the government, the manners of the country, its police, and he is the only one of the four who from all that he has seen will carry home any observation useful to his own country.

The ancients travelled little, read little, and wrote few books; yet we see in those books that remain to us, that they observed each other more thoroughly than we observe our contemporaries.  Without going back to the days of Homer, the only poet who transports us to the country he describes, we cannot deny to Herodotus the glory of having painted manners in his history, though he does it rather by narrative than by comment; still he does it better than all our historians whose books are overladen with portraits and characters.  Tacitus has described the Germans of his time better than any author has described the Germans of to-day.  There can be no doubt that those who have devoted themselves to ancient history know more about the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Gauls, and Persians than any nation of to-day knows about its neighbours.