When we find a disposition to talk over our adventures, the great ice islands driving down _Rhenus ferox_, as Seneca justly calls it, and threatening to run against and destroy our awkward ill-contrived boat, may divert care over a winter’s fire, some evening in England, by recollection of past perils. I thought it a dreadful one at the time; and have no taste to renew a like scene for the sake of crossing the Scheld, and arriving a very few moments sooner than returning through Brussels will bring us--_a la Place de_
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.