Where every thing appears to me to be just like England, at least just by it; and in fact four and twenty hours would carry us thither with a fair wind: and now it really does feel as if the journey were over; and even in that sensation, though there is some pleasure, there is some pain too;—the time and the places are past;—and I have only left to wish, that my improvements of the one, and my accounts of the others, were better; for though Mr. Sherlock comforts his followers with the kind assertion, That if a hundred men of parts travelled over Italy, and each made a separate book of what he saw and observed, a hundred excellent compositions might be made, of which no two should be alike, yet all new, all resembling the original, and all admirable of their kind.—One’s constantly-recurring fear is, lest the readers should cry out, with Juliet—

How truly might they say so, did I mention the oddity (for oddity it still is) in this town of Lille, to see dogs drawing in carts as beasts of burden, and lying down in the market-place when their work is done, to gnaw the bones thrown them by their drivers: they are of mastiff race seemingly, crossed by the bull-dog, yet not quarrelsome at all. This is a very awkward and barbarous practice however, and, as far as I know, confined to this city; for in all others, people seem to have found out, that horses, asses, and oxen are the proper creatures to draw wheel carriages—except indeed at Vienna, where the streets are so very narrow, that the men resolve rather to be harnessed than run over.

How fine I thought these churches thirteen years ago, comes now thirteen times a-day into my head; they are not fine at all; but it was the first time I had ever crossed the channel, and I thought every thing a wonder, and fancied we were arrived at the world’s end almost; so differently do the self-same places appear to the self-same people surrounded by different circumstances! I now feel as if we were at Canterbury. Was one to go to Egypt, the sight of Naples on the return home would probably afford a like sensation of proximity: and I recollect, one of the gentlemen who had been with Admiral Anson round the world told us, that when he came back as near as our East India settlements, he considered the voyage as finished, and all his toils at an end—so is my little book; and (if Italy may be considered, upon Sherlock’s principle, as a sort of academy-figure set up for us all to draw from) my design of it may have a chance to go in the portfolio with the rest, after its exhibition-day is over.

With regard to the general effect travelling has upon the human mind, it is different with different people. Brydone has observed, that the magnetic needle loses her habits upon the heights of Ætna, nor ever more regains her partiality for the north, till again newly touched by the loadstone: it is so with many men who have lived long from home; they find, like Imogen,

and if they return to it after an absence of several years, bring back with them an alienated mind—this is not well. Others there are, who, being accustomed to live a considerable time in places where they have not the smallest intention to fix for ever, but on the contrary firmly resolve to leave sometime, learn to treat the world as a man treats his mistress, whom he likes well enough, but has no design to marry, and of course never provides for—this is not well neither. A third set gain the love of hurrying perpetually from place to place; living familiarly with all, but intimately with none; till confounding their own ideas (still undisclosed) of right and wrong, they learn to think virtue and vice ambulatory, as Browne says; profess that climate and constitution regulate men’s actions, till they try to persuade their companions into a belief most welcome to themselves, that the will of God in one place is by no means his will in another; and most resemble in their whirling fancies a boy’s top I once saw shewn by a professor who read us a lecture upon opticks; it was painted in regular stripes round like a narrow ribbon, red, blue, green, and yellow; we set it a-spinning by direction of our philosopher, who, whipping it merrily about, obtained as a general effect the total privation of all the four colours, so distinct at the beginning of its tour;—it resembled a dirty white!

With these reflexions and recollections we drove forward to Calais, where I left the following lines at our inn:

It would have been graceless not to give these lines a companion on the other side the water, like Dean Swift’s distich before and after he climbed Penmanmaur: these verses were therefore written, and I believe still remain, in an apartment of the Ship inn:

THE END.