or fixing scenery on the mental
retina, as well as for comparison of notes as to an _alibi_, for duly
remembering things heard and seen, as well as for being humbled in
having (as a matter inevitable) left unseen just the best lion of the
whole tour, journals are a most praiseworthy pastime, and usually rank
among the earliest efforts of an embryo author's mind.

It is a thing of commonest course, that, in this age of inveterate
locomotion, your present humble friend, now talking in this candid
fashion with your readership, has been every where, seen every thing,
and done his touristic devoirs like every body else about him: also, as
a like circumstance of etymological triviality, that he has severally,
and from time to time, recorded for self-amusement and the edification
of others all such matters as holiday-making school-boys and
boarding-misses, and government-clerks in their swift-speeding vacation,
and elderly gentlemen vainly striving to enjoy their first fretful
continental trip, usually think proper to descant upon. Of such
manuscripts the world is clearly full; no catacomb of mummies more
fertile of papyri; no traveller so poor but he has by him a packet of
precious notes, whereon he sets much store: every tourist thinks he can
reasonably emulate clever Basil Hall, in his eloquent fragments of
voyages and travels; and I, for my part, a truth-teller to my own
detriment, am ashamed to confess the existence of

A DECADE OF JOURNALS;

which of olden time my _cacoethes_ produced as regularly as recurred the
summer solstice. Unlike that of Livy's, I am satisfied that this poor
Decade be irrevocably lost; but, for dear recollection's sake of days
gone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation.
Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-side
wanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, _a la
Roscoe_, be set forth. But--what conceivable news can be told at this
time of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded British isles?
Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to the
top of Egyptian pyramids or the bottom of Polish salt-mines, my
authorship would long since have publicly declared, in common with many
a monkey, that it had "seen the world." As things are, to Bruce,
Buckingham, Belzoni, and that glorious anomaly, the blind brave Holman,
let us leave the harvest of praise, worthy to be reaped as their own by
moder