One Knows Pretty Nearly The Books That One Is
Prepared To Re-Read In This Department Of Literature.
Marco Polo,
Herodotus, a few sections in Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the
early travellers in Palestine, Commodore Byron's Travels,
Curzon
and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Mungo Park, Dubois,
Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of Borrow (fact or
fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace,
The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine,
The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have
run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would
not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding
works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should
we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is
good reason to hope, is only one of suspended animation.
To come to surer ground, it is a fact worth noting that each of
the four great prose masters of the third quarter of the
eighteenth century tried his hand at a personal record of travel.
Fielding came first in 1754 with his Journal of a Voyage to
Lisbon. Twelve years later was published Smollett's Travels
through France and Italy. Then, in 1768, Sterne's Sentimental
Journey; followed in 1775 by Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides.
Each of the four - in which beneath the apparel of the man of
letters we can discern respectively the characteristics of police
magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist - enjoyed a fair
amount of popularity in its day.
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