world is occupied about them. Foolish husbands are always jealous of their authority, and fearful of being supposed to be ruled; they oppose, for the sake of asserting themselves, even when their inclinations are neutral: and once launched into an opposition, they persevere, in spite of conviction, because it does not become their dignity to be less wise than a woman. LES ROCHERS DE MAD. DE SÉVIGNÉ. "Travellers ne'er did lie, though fools at home condemn them." SHAKSPEARE. It is no longer possible to exclaim with Madame de Sévigné, "c'est une chose étrange, que les grands voyages!" Les grands voyages, on the contrary, have become the most common and everyday events of life! A "good traveller" has ceased to be "something at the latter end of a dinner," as La Feu has it: and to talk of the "Pyrenean and the river Po," would now incur for the prosing delinquent the character of a bore, and the penalty of being once heard and ever after avoided. Travelling, even to "Judah's barren sands," is no longer a distinction; and the Traveller's Club has so completely become every body's club, that it has been proposed, by way of something really exclusive, to start a crocchio ristretto of those who have never travelled at all. To talk of a visit to Paris is as cockney as to prate of the lakes of Cumberland or to cite their poets; to boast of having seen the Pope pontificate, is as pure a John-Gilpinism, as to chatter of Fonthill; and to have "swum in a gondola" is no more thought of, God save the mark! than a voyage in the Richmond steamer. The Pacific Ocean and the British Channel have become subjects equally commonplace; and if another Peyrouse should disappear from the world, it is odds but he would be picked up in a month by some wandering dandy from Bond-street, or discovered on an uninhabited island by a roving detachment from the Yacht Club. "How came you to alter your route last year? I thought to have met you at Thebes!" "Oh! I changed my mind, on hearing that half Bloomsbury were there before me; and so cut off for the North Pole with Parry.” "Did you meet any one there one knows ?" "No, that's the charm of it. White bears excepted, one has the place to one's self. Whom did you have, by the by, at Athens last year ?" "Scarcely a soul; at least, scarcely a soul above buttons." There were a few third-rate English and first-rate Irish to be seen, sauntering about the Acropolis, and making goûtés in the Parthenon; but pas âme qui vive—that one ever heard of before. The A.'s pushed on for the Pyramids, the B.'s have been some time settled on the brow of Mount Caucasus, C. left us in the spring for the Crimea, and D. joined his eternal Pylades at Ispahan." "At Ispahan! what a fellow that D. is, with his eternal pretensions to taste! Go to Ispahan! when one is sick of it, and its Hajji Babas of Bond-street, and all that sort of thing. No one turns his horse's head to the South now, unless indeed it were in search of the terra incog nita. It is the merest pont aux ânes. One's very tailor passes his vacances at Smyrna (where mine, by the by, picked up some charming cachemirs, to make cool coats for next winter); and you know the old story of Lady Lydia's maid and Monsieur Forbin, and the silk parasol, in the ruins of Thebes. The North, Sir, the North is the only thing now, the Frozen sea, or Kamtschatka, via Moscow, that's my carte de voyage for the next travelling season. Have you seen my Droshka ?" "No; but I have a Britska waiting for me at Petersburgh. I am going to join Lord Frederick J—, who has the prettiest thing on the Sea of Azoff, built by Potemkin. Will you be des nôtres ?" "With all my heart. Let us rendezvous at Novogorod, embark at Smolensko on the Dnieper, and so proceed by Kerson and the steppes." 66 Exactly; and that will bring us within two verstes of Lord F.'s villa." It is thus that the home-bred youths "prate of their whereabouts." Not only il n'y a plus de Pyrénées, but the total annihilation of time and place seems to have realized the poet's rant, and to have turned the nursery-dream of Peter Wilkins and his flying men to a "flat reality." While British travellers are thus illustrating the "march of mind," by marching off to all parts of the globe, and "When pleasure begins to grow dull in the East, |