88
Roads of Asia 90
The March up and down 91
The Early Travellers 92
The Wilderness of Lop 94
Hebrew Travellers 94
A Jewish Road-book 96
Inns of Cathay 98
Tartar Post-houses 99
The Khan's Foot-posts 100
The Roads of the Incas 101
New Roads 104
Work and Pain 106
Work and Wages 107
Reaction and its inconveniences 108
Sydney Smith 110
Keeping Troth 111
Conclusion 112

OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS.

We have histories of all kinds in abundance,--and yet no good History of
Roads. "Wines ancient and modern," "Porcelain," "Crochet work,"
"Prisons," "Dress," "Drugs," and "Canary birds," have all and each found
a chronicler more or less able; and the most stately and imposing volume
we remember ever to have turned over was a history of "Button-making:"
you saw at once, by the measured complacency of the style, that the
author regarded his buttons as so many imperial medals. But of roads,
except Bergier's volumes on the Roman Ways, and a few learned yet rather
repulsive treatises in Latin and German, we have absolutely no readable
history. How has it come to pass that in works upon civilization, so
many in number, so few in worth, there are no chapters devoted to the
great arteries of commerce and communication? The subject of roads does
not appear even on that long list of books which the good Quintus Fixlein
_intended_ to write. Of Railways indeed, both British and foreign, there
are a few interesting memorials; but Railways are one branch only of a
subject which dates at least from the building of Damascus, earliest of
recorded cities.

Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations
comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting
it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons
have not essayed "this great argument," since they generally rush in,
where their betters fear to tread. A