otamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile.
And the Traveller's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the
candidates put up for election, because now-a-days almost every
tolerably educated Englishman has travelled more than six hundred miles
in a straight direction from the British Metropolis.

Bearing these facts in mind, the travels of Captain Dangerous, widely
extended as they were, may not appear to the present generation as very
uncommon or very surprising. But such travellers as my hero, formed, in
the last century, a class apart, and were, in most cases, very strange
men. Diplomatic agents belonging to the aristocracy rarely ventured
beyond the confines of Europe. The Ambassadors sent to eastern climes
were usually, although accredited from the English Court, maintained at
the charge of great commercial corporations, such as the Turkey and
Russia Companies, and were selected less on the score of their having
handles to their names, or being born Russells, Greys, and Elliots, than
because they had led roving and adventurous lives, and had fought in or
traded with the countries where they were appointed to reside. Beyond
these, the travelling class was made up of merchants, buccaneers,
spies, and, notably, of political adventurers, and English, Scotch, and
Irish Romanist Priests. The unhappy political dissensions which raged in
this country from the time of the Great Rebellion to the accession of
George the Third, and the infamous penal laws against the Roman
Catholics, periodically drove into banishment vast numbers of loyal
gentlemen and their families, and ecclesiastics of the ancient faith,
who expatriated themselves for conscience' sake, or through dread of the
bloody enactments levelled at those who worshipped God as their fathers
had done before them. The Irish and Scotch soldiers who took service
under continental sovereigns sprinkled the army lists of France, of
Spain, and of Austria with O's and Macs. There was scarcely a European
city without an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic monastery or nunnery, and
scarcely a seaport without a colony of British exiles cast upon foreign
shores after the tempests of the Boyne, of Sheriffmuir, of Preston, or
of Culloden. When these refugees went abroad it was to remain for ten,
for twenty, for thirty years, or for life. The travelling of the present
century is spasmodic, that of the last century was chronic.

I do not know whether the "Adventur