"This is the way I like to study history, and this is the way never to forget it," said he. "I hated the very names of Tacitus and Livy, but how delightful I think them now!" and so we did _do_ Italy from Agrigentum to the Alps, and from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, and many queer out-of-the-way places we visited, and such scores of sketches we carried away; and a more delightful trip never was made before or since.
Captain Hutchinson, in his introduction to "Try Lapland," writes, "The difficulty of finding new ground for travel is increasing every year for those who, with but a limited time at their disposal, are yet tired of the beaten paths of Ramsgate or Scarborough, Switzerland or the Rhine, and pant after lands fresh and fair, of which they have never seen the photograph—where the gorgeous hotel with its elongated bills, and the pertinacious touter with his cringing greasy manners, are alike unknown."
Now to a great extent that pleasant writer is correct; but the man who rushing away from the turmoil and bustle of London life, whether he be lawyer, merchant, or physician, seeking for fresh air and scenery, but as far away as possible from those hackneyed tracks infested by the typical tourist, both English and Transatlantic, and by poor Marryat's "shilling-seeking, napkin-holding, up-and-downstairs son of a sea-cook" of an hotel waiter, need not go to the Arctic Circle to find all the above-named advantages, unless, indeed, he is bent on also seeing the sun at midnight, and his own body a prey to the mosquitoes.
Within five days of Temple Bar, or as we soon shall have to say, where Temple Bar once stood, there are as splendid countries to explore, as fine ruins to contemplate, as glorious scenery and as gorgeous costumes to admire, as the heart of man can wish for; and if the reader will trust himself with me for a little while, excusing the many shortcomings he will meet with in these pages, I will lead him over a trip I took last Summer which I think will fully repay him, though he will often have to make great allowances and deal leniently with the Author, who for the first time in his life rushes into print, just for the same reason that the stars shine above us, because he has nothing else to do! But if through publishing this little book he shall have opened up a new field of travel to those who yearly require to recruit their strength of body and of mind by a ramble in foreign lands, if he shall have added one more possible source of enjoyment to those within the reach of the many, he will consider himself amply repaid for whatever trouble he may have been put to in its compilation.