history or his romance.  Then, the story told, up starts the busy and provident tourist; lo! the voiture is waiting for him at the hotel; in he leaps, and we with him, and off we rattle through other scenes, and to other cities.  He has a track in space to which he is bound; we recognize the necessity that he should proceed thereon; but he can diverge at pleasure through all time, bear us off into what age he pleases, make us utterly oblivious of the present, and lap us in the Elysium of a good story.

With a book written palpably for the sole and most amiable purpose of amusement, and succeeding in this purpose, how should we deal?  How but receive it with a passive acquiescence equally amiable, content solely to be amused, and giving all severer criticism—­to him who to his other merits may add, if he pleases, that of being the first critic.  Most especially let us not be carping and questioning as to the how far, or what precisely, we are to set down for true.  It is all true—­it is all fiction; the artist cannot choose but see things in an artistical form; what ought not to be there drops from his field of vision.  We are not poring through a microscope, or through a telescope, to discover new truths; we are looking at the old landscape through coloured glasses, blue, or black, or roseate, as the occasion may require.  And here let us note a favourable contrast between our dramatic tourist, bold in conception, free in execution, and those compatriots of our own, authors and authoresses, who write travels merely because they are artists in ink, yet without any adequate notion of the duties and privileges of such an artist.

When a writer has got a name, the first rational use to make of the charming possession is to get astride of it, as a witch upon her broomstick, and whisk and scamper over half the kingdoms of the earth.  Talk of bills of exchange!—­letters of credit!—­we can put our name to a whole book, and it will pass—­it will pass.  The idea is good—­quite worthy of our commercial genius—­and to us its origin, we believe, is due; but here, as in so many other cases, the Frenchman has given the idea its full development.  Keeping steadily in view the object of his book, which is—­first, amusement—­secondly, amusement—­thirdly, amusement; he adapts his means consistently to his end.  Does he want a dialogue?—­he writes one:  a story?—­he invents one:  a description?—­he takes his hint from nature, and is grateful—­the more grateful, because he knows that a hint to the wise is sufficient.  It is the description only which the reader will be concerned with; what has he to do with the object?  That is the merely traveller’s affair.  Now, your English tourists have always a residue of scruple about them which balks their genius.  Not satisfied with pleasing, they aspire to be believed; are almost angry if their anecdote is not credited; content themselves with adding graces, giving a turn, trimming and decorating—­cannot