"Thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one."—King Henry V.

No philosophical or moral fitness will qualify a traveller to observe a people if he does not select a mode of travelling which will enable him to see and converse with a great number and variety of persons. An ambassador has no chance of learning much of the people he visits anywhere but in a new country like America. While he is en route, he is too stately in appearance to allow of any familiarity on the part of the people by the road-side. His carriages might almost as well roll through a city of the dead, for anything he will learn from intercourse with the living. The case is not much better when a family or a party of friends travel together on the Continent, committing the business of the expedition to servants, and shrinking from intercourse, on all social occasions, with English shyness or pride.

The behaviour of the English on the Continent has become a matter of very serious consequence to the best informed and best mannered of their countrymen, as it has long been to the natives into whose society they may happen to fall. I have heard gentlemen say that they lose half their pleasure in going abroad, from the coldness and shyness with which the English are treated; a coldness and shyness which they think fully warranted by the conduct of their predecessors in travel. I have heard ladies say that they find great difficulty in becoming acquainted with their neighbours at the tables-d'hÔte; and that, when they have succeeded, an apology for the reluctance to converse has been offered, in the form of explanation that English travellers generally "appear to dislike being spoken to" so much as to render it a matter of civility to leave them alone. The travelling arrangements of the English seem designed to cut them off from companionship with the people they go to see; and they preclude the possibility of studying morals and manners in a way which is perfectly ludicrous to persons of a more social temperament and habits.

A good deal may be learned on board steam-boats, and in such vehicles as the American stages; and when accommodations of the kind become common, it will be difficult for the sulkiest Englishman to avoid admitting some ideas into his mind from the conversation and actions of the groups around him. When steam-boats ply familiarly on the Indus, and we have the rail-road to Calcutta which people are joking about, and another across the Pampas,—when we make trips to New Zealand, and think little of a run down the west coast of Africa,—places where we shall go for fashion's sake, and cannot go boxed up in a carriage of Long Acre origin,—our countrymen will, perforce, exchange conversation with the persons they meet, and may chance to get rid of the unsociability for which they are notorious, and by which they cast a veil over hearts and faces, and a shadow over their own path, wherever they go.

Meantime, the wisest and happiest traveller is the pedestrian. If gentlemen and ladies want to see pictures, let them post to Florence, and be satisfied with learning what they can from the windows by the way. But if they want to see either scenery or people, let all who have strength and courage go on foot. I prefer this even to horseback. A horse is an anxiety and a trouble. Something is sure to ail it; and one is more anxious about its accommodation than about one's own. The pedestrian traveller is wholly free from care. There is no such freeman on earth as he is for the time. His amount of toil is usually within his own choice,—in any civilized region. He can go on and stop when he likes: if a fit of indolence overtakes him, he can linger for a day or a week in any spot that pleases him. He is not whirled past a beautiful view almost before he has seen it. He is not tantalized by the idea that from this or that point he could see something still finer, if he could but reach it. He can reach almost every point his wishes wander to. The pleasure is indescribable of saying to one's self, "I will go there,"—"I will rest yonder,"—and forthwith accomplishing it. He can sit on a rock in the midst of a rushing stream as often in a day as he likes. He can hunt a waterfall by its sound; a sound which the carriage-wheels prevent other travellers from hearing. He can follow out any tempting glade in any wood. There is no cushion of moss at the foot of an old tree that he may not sit down on if he pleases. He can read for an hour without fear of passing by something unnoticed while his eyes are fixed upon his book. His food is welcome, be its quality what it may, while he eats it under the alders in some recess of a brook. He is secure of his sleep, be his chamber ever so sordid; and when his waking eyes rest upon his knapsack, his heart leaps with pleasure as he remembers where he is, and what a day is before him. Even the weather seems to be of less consequence to the pedestrian than to other travellers. A pedestrian journey presupposes abundance of time, so that the traveller can rest in villages on rainy days, and in the shade of a wood during the hours when the sun is too powerful. And if he prefers not waiting for the rain, it is not the evil to him that it would be in cities and in the pursuit of business. The only evil of rain that I know of, to healthy persons in exercise, is that it spoils the clothes; and the clothes of a pedestrian traveller are not usually of a spoilable quality. Rain does not deform the face of things everywhere as it does in a city. It adds a new aspect of beauty occasionally to a wood, to mountains, to lake and ocean scenery. I remember a hale, cheerful pedestrian tourist whom we met frequently among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and whom we remarked as being always the briskest of the company at the hotel table in the evening, and the merriest at breakfast. He had the best of it one day, when we passed him in Franconia Defile, after a heavy rain had set in. We were packed in a waggon which seemed likely to fill with water before we got to our destination; and miserable enough we looked, drenched and cold. The traveller was marching on over the rocky road, his book safe in its oil-skin cover, and his clothes-bag similarly protected; his face bright and glowing with exercise, and his summer jacket of linen feeling, as he told us, all the pleasanter for being wet through. As he passed each recess of the defile, he looked up perpetually to see the rain come smoking out of the fissures of the rocks; and when he reached the opening by which he was to descend to the plain, he stood still, to watch the bar of dewy yellow light which lay along the western sky where the sun had just set. He looked just as happy on other days. Sometimes we passed him lying along on a hill side; sometimes talking with a family at the door of a log-house; sometimes reading as he walked under the shade of the forest. I, for one, often longed to dismiss our waggon or barouche, and to follow his example.

One peculiar advantage of pedestrian travelling is the pleasure of a gradual approach to celebrated or beautiful places. Every turn of the road gains in interest; every object that meets the eye seems to have some initiative meaning; and when the object itself at last appears, nothing can surpass the delight of flinging one's self on the ground to rest upon the first impression, and to interpose a delicious pause before the final attainment. It is not the same thing to desire your driver to stop when you come to the point of view. The first time that I felt this was on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, when I was at length to see mountains. The imagination of myself and my companion had fixed strongly on Dunkeld, as being a scene of great beauty, and our first resting-place among the mountains. The sensation had been growing all the morning. Men, houses, and trees had seemed to be growing diminutive,—an irresistible impression to the novice in mountain scenery: the road began to follow the windings of the Tay, a sign that the plain was contracting into a pass. Beside a cistern, on a green bank of this pass, we had dined; a tract of heath next lay before us, and we traversed it so freshly and merrily as to be quite unaware that we were getting towards the end of our seventeen miles, though still conscious that the spirit of the mountains was upon us. We were deeply engaged in talk, when a winding of the road brought us in full view of the lovely scene which is known to all who have approached Dunkeld by the Perth road. We could scarcely believe that this was it, so soon. We turned to our map and guide-book, and found that we were standing on the site of Birnam wood; that Dunsinane hill was in sight, and that it was indeed the old cathedral tower of Dunkeld that rose so grandly among the beeches behind the bridge. We took such a long and fond gaze as I never enjoyed from a carriage window. If it was thus with an object of no more importance or difficulty of attainment than Dunkeld, what must it be to catch the first view of the mysterious temples that

or to survey from a height, at sunrise, the brook Kedron and the valley of Jehoshaphat!

What is most to our present purpose, however, is the consideration of the facilities afforded by pedestrian travelling for obtaining a knowledge of the people. We all remember Goldsmith's travels with his flute, his sympathies, his cordiality of heart and manner, and his reliance on the hospitality of the country people. Such an one as he is not bound to take up with such specimens as he may meet with by the side of the high road; he can penetrate into the recesses of the country, and drop into the hamlet among the hills, and the homesteads down the lanes, and now and then spend a day with the shepherd in his fold on the downs; he can stop where there is a festival, and solve many a perplexity by carrying over the conversation of one day into the intercourse of the next, with a fresh set of people; he can obtain access to almost every class of persons, and learn their own views of their own affairs. His opportunities are inestimable.

If it were a question which could learn most of Morals and Manners by travel,—the gentleman accomplished in philosophy and learning, proceeding in his carriage, with a courier,—or a simple pedestrian tourist, furnished only with the language, and with an open heart and frank manners,—I should have no doubt that the pedestrian would return more familiar with his subject than the other. If the wealthy scholar and philosopher could make himself a citizen of the world for the time, and go forth on foot, careless of luxury, patient of fatigue, and fearless of solitude, he would be not only of the highest order of tourists, but a benefactor to the highest kind of science; and he would become familiarized with what few are acquainted with,—the best pleasures, transient and permanent, of travel. Those who cannot pursue this method will achieve most by laying aside state, conversing with the people they fall in with, and diverging from the high road as much as possible. Nothing need be said on a matter so obvious as the necessity of understanding the language of the people visited. Some familiarity with it must be attained before anything else can be done. It seems to be unquestioned, however, that a good deal of the unsociability of the English abroad is owing not so much to contempt of their neighbours, as to the natural pride which makes them shrink from attempting what they cannot do well. I am confident that we say much less than we feel about the awkwardness and constraint of our first self-committals to a foreign language. It is impossible but that every one must feel the weight of the penalty of making himself ridiculous at every step, and of presenting a kind of false appearance of himself to every one with whom he converses. A German gentleman in America, who has exactly that right degree of self-respect which enabled him to set strenuously about learning English, of which he did not understand a word, and who mastered it so completely as to lecture in faultless English at the end of two years, astonished a party of friends one day, persuaded as they were that they perfectly knew him, and that the smooth and deliberate flow of his beautiful language was a consequence of the calmness of his temper, and the philosophical character of his mind. A German woman with children came begging to the house while the party were at their dessert. The professor caught her tones when the door of the dining-room was open; he rushed into the hall, presently returned for a dish or two, and emptied the gingerbread, and other material of the dessert, into her lap. The company went out to see, and found the professor transformed; he was talking with a rapidity and vehemence which they had never supposed him capable of; and one of the party told me how sorry she felt, and has felt ever since, to think of the state of involuntary disguise in which he is living among those who would know him best. Difference of language is undeniably a cause of great suffering and difficulty, magnificent and incalculable as are its uses. It is no exception to the general rule that every great good involves some evil.

Happily, however, the difficulty may be presently so far surmounted as not to interfere with the object of observing Morals and Manners. Impossible as it may be to attain to an adequate expression of one's self in a foreign tongue, it is easy to most persons to learn to understand it perfectly when spoken by others. During this process, a common and almost unavoidable mistake is to suppose a too solemn and weighty meaning in what is expressed in an unfamiliar language. This arises partly from our having become first acquainted with the language in books; and partly from the meaning having been attained with effort, and seeming, by natural association, worth the pains. The first French dialogues which a child learns, seem more emphatic in their meanings than the same material would in English; and the student of German finds a grandeur in lines of Schiller, and in clauses of Herder's and Krummacher's Parables, which he looks for in vain when he is practised in the language. It is well to bear this in mind on a first entrance into a foreign society, or the traveller may chance to detect himself treasuring up nonsense, and making much of mere trivialities, because they reached him clothed in the mystery of a strange language. He will be like lame Jervas, when he first came up from the mine in which he was born, caressing the weeds he had gathered by the road side, and refusing till the last moment to throw away such wonderful and beautiful things. The raw traveller not only sees something mysterious, picturesque, or classical in every object that meets his eye after passing the frontier, from the children's toys to palaces and general festivals, but is apt to discern wisdom and solemnity in everything that is said to him, from the greeting of the landlord to the speculations of the politician. If not guarded against, this natural tendency will more or less vitiate the observer's first impressions, and introduce something of the ludicrous into his record of them.

From the consideration of the requisites for observation in the traveller himself, we now proceed to indicate what he is to observe, in order to inform himself of foreign Morals and Manners.