University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

Ever since the invention of steam engines, steam
boats, steam carriages, Liverpool packets, rail roads,
and other delightful facilities for travelling, the march
of the human body has kept pace with the march of the
human mind, so that it is now a moot point which gets
on the faster. If the body moves at the rate of fifteen
miles an hour, the mind advances in an equal pace, and
children of sixteen are in a fair way to become wiser
than their grandfathers. While the grown up gentleman
goes to Albany in twelve hours, and comes back
in forty-eight with a charter in his pocket, the aspiring
schoolboy smatters a language, or conquers a science,
by the aid of those vast improvements, in the “machinery”
of the mind, which have immortalized the age.
In fact, there seems to be a race between matter and
mind, and there is no telling which will come out first
in the end.

Legislators and philosophers may flatter themselves
as they will, but they have little influence in shaping
this world. The inventors of paper money, cotton

machinery, steam engines and steam boats, have
caused a greater revolution in the habits, opinions and
morals of mankind, than all the systems of philosophy,
aided by all the efforts of legislation. Machinery and
steam engines have had more influence on the Christian
world, than Locke's metaphysics, Napoleon's code, or
Jeremy Bentham's codification; and we have heard a
great advocate for domestic manufactures predict, the
time was not far distant, when men and women and
children would be of no use but to construct and attend
upon machinery—when spinning jennies would become
members of congress, and the United States be governed
by a steam engine of a hundred and twenty horse
power. We confess ourselves not quite so sanguine,
but will go so far as to say, we believe the time may
come when a long speech will be spun out of a bale of
cotton by a spinning jenny; a president of the United
States be made by a combination of machinery; and
Mynheer Maelzel be beaten at chess by his own automaton.

Without diving deeper into such speculations, or tracing
the effects of these vast improvements in the condition
of mankind, who will soon have nothing to do
but tend upon machinery, we shall content ourselves with
observing that the wonderful facilities for locomotion
furnished by modern ingenuity have increased the number

of travellers to such a degree, that they now constitute
a large portion of the human family. All ages and
sexes are to be found on the wing, in perpetual motion
from place to place. Little babies are seen crying
their way in steam boats, whose cabins are like so
many nurseries—people who are the most comfortable
at home, are now most fond of going abroad—the
spruce shopman exclaims “Adieu La Boutique,” and
leaves the shopboy to cheat the town for him—the
young belle, tired of seeing and being seen in Broadway,
breaks forth in all her glories in a new place at
five hundred miles distance—bedrid age musters its
last energies for an expedition to West Point, or the
Grand Canal—and even the thrifty housewife of the
villages on the banks of the Hudson, who heretofore
was “all one as a piece of the house,” thinks nothing
of risking a blow up, or a break down, in making a
voyage to New York to sell a pair of mittens, or buy a
paper of pins. We have heard a great political economist
assert, that the money spent in travelling between
New York and Albany, in the last fifteen years, would
go near to maintain all the paupers of the United States
in that the purest of all possible states of independence—to
wit, a freedom from an ignominious dependence
on labour and economy. It is high time, therefore,
that the wandering Arabs of the west should have
a code of laws, and regulations for their especial government,
and the principal design of the present work
is to supply this desideratum.

We have accordingly prepared a system of jurisprudence,
which, we flatter ourselves, will not suffer in
comparison, either with the code Napoleon—the code
Bentham—or any other code which the march of mind
hath begotten on the progress of public improvement
in the present age. The traveller, if we mistake not,
will find in it ample instructions, as to his outfits in
setting forth for unknown parts—the places and things
most worthy of attention in his route—the deportment
proper in divers new and untried situations—and above
all, critical and minute instructions, concerning those
exquisite delights of the palate, which constitute the
principal object of all travellers of taste.

In addition to this, we have omitted no opportunity
of inculcating a passion for travelling, which from long
laborious experience, we pronounce the most exquisite
mode of killing time and spending money ever yet devised
by lazy ingenuity. It would occupy our whole
book—which is restricted to a certain bulk, so as not
to interfere with the ladies' bandboxes and the gentlemen's
trunks—were we to indulge in a summary of all
the delights and advantages of seeing new and distant
parts. Unfortunately for us we write solely for the

benefit of the world, holding our own especial emoluments
in sovereign contempt; and still more unfortunately,
if this were not the case, we belong not to that
favoured class of writers, who can take the liberty of
publishing in six royal octavos, matter which might be
compressed in one. We have only space to observe,
that a man who has travelled to good purpose, and
made a proper use of his opportunities, may commit as
many blunders and tell as many good stories as he
pleases, provided he confines himself to places, where
he has been, and his hearers have not. Books are of
no authority in opposition to an eyewitness; who is, as
it were, like so many of our great politicians—exofficio,
a judge of every thing.

Two persons were once disputing in a large company,
about the Venus de Medicis. One maintained that
her head inclined a little forward to the right, the other
that it inclined to the left. One had read Winckelman,
and a hundred other descriptions of the statue. The
other had never read a book in his life; but he had been
at Florence, and looked at the Venus, for at least five
minutes.

“My dear sir—I ought to know; for I have read all
the books, that were ever written on the Venus de
Medicis.”

“My dear sir—I must know; for I have been at
Florence and seen her.”

Here was an end of the argument. All the company
was perfectly satisfied, that the man who had seen with
his own eyes was right—and yet he was wrong. But
seeing is believing, and being believed too. You may
doubt what a man affirms on the authority of another;
but if he says he has seen the sea serpent, to doubt his
veracity is to provoke a quarrel. Such are the advantages
of seeing with our own eyes! Let us therefore
set out without delay on the Grand Northern
Tour.