ON THE QUALIFICATIONS OF A TRAVELLER.* DR. CLARKE says, 66 a sense of unearned praise, bestowed by too eager anticipation, weighs heavy on his mind." There is no help for this. It is a man's own fault if he has made his main literary adventure additionally hazardous, by precursory proofs of uncommon talents and acquirements. Our author must submit to bear this evil, of meeting a very raised state of the public expectation; and we fear we cannot honestly hold out to him the slenderest hope, that he will feel any alleviation of it, when preparing to publish the next part of the series of his travels.

Dr. Clarke, we said, is regarded as a traveller of no ordinary class; and the truth is, he is of no class. He is superior to that peculiarity of taste and observation, by which the greater proportion of travellers are marked as of particular species; the respective distinctions of which imply something much more limited and less dignified, than that comprehensive intelligence, which speculating on every place and object through the medium of every kind of knowledge, brings home an entire estimate of the regions surveyed. We have travellers whose tastes and qualifications are specially directed and adapted to the object of ascertaining elementary geographical facts, the situations, divisions, and most obvious appearances of imperfectly known tracts of the earth; of extending our knowledge of its minerals or vegetables; of exploring and illustrating antiquities; of accumulating facts and observations relative to political economy; of drawing sketches of national manners; or of catching the light shapes of amusement, and finding occasions of being witty. There have been travellers also, who, without any very specific pursuit, and without any considerable pretensions to either science or learning, have been content with the general exercise of mere good sense on such matters as are within its cognizance. Travellers of several of these classes, when they excel in their particular capacity, will always be regarded as valuable

Travels in various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. By Edward Daniel Clarke, LL.D. Part the First: Russia, Tartary, and Turkey. 4to. 1810.

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contributors to our knowledge or entertainment; but it is necessarily with a higher satisfaction, that we meet on his return a traveller, who unites in himself the qualifications for taking account of all those aspects of a country under which it would be contemplated, severally, by the specific classes of travellers; a man, whose watchful and penetrating mind is never baffled, in any of its attempted operations, for want of an appropriate apparatus. The present author appears to meet this description in an extraordinary degree. He is a mineralogist, a botanist, a connoisseur-as to the arts to which that cant denomination most commonly refers-a critic, an antiquary, a historian, a lively painter of manners; but all these qualifications are so involved and combined in the one element of general philosophic intelligence, that no one of them has an excessive predominance; nor in the exercise of any one of them is the author's manner for a moment that which is usually observable in a man who can exercise no other. It is never the manner of the mere naturalist, the mere connoisseur, &c. &c., but of an enlightened observer who has learnt to judge of the absolute, in a great measure by the relative, importance of the various classes of facts and inquiries; and never expends so much attention on one as to give it a disproportionate consequence, or excite a suspicion that he may not be master of the others. And that he is the master of the various departments, will be obvious to the reader by the time he has advanced through a moderate portion of the volume, in that remarkable appearance of ease with which he slightly adverts to, or more or less expatiates on, any of the facts or principles belonging to them, so unlike that effort and ostentation often visible in the references of writers, who have but a smattering of knowledge on subjects with which they are, notwithstanding, willing to have the credit of being acquainted. The same ease distinguishes also the style of our traveller, which is of natural construction, though the language of a scholar; as free from vulgarity and every sort of slang, as from pomp and pedantry; and in general happily descriptive. The writer is remarkably successful in putting the reader in possession of a fact by means of a delicate and dexterous turn of expression, where a bare explicit statement could by no possible choice of words avoid being grossly offensive. There are several instances of this in

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his descriptions of the surpassing abominations of Russian filth.

Dr. Clarke enjoyed high advantages in the latter part of his travelling enterprises, and in every part of the final composition of his relation of them,-from his having visited so many countries. He appears to have seen whatever is most worthy of attention in almost all the countries of Europe. He was thus progressively acquiring, throughout a considerable series of years, a more philosophic standard by which to estimate the different nations, by means of that wide comparative view, which was enabling him to attain a collective estimate of incomparably the most important portion of the human race. One result of this advantage is, that the book is clear of all language of puerile surprise and extravagant wonderment. And besides the general and philosophic effect of this extensive experience on our author's representations, the reader has the benefit of it in many distinct particulars of coincidence or contrast between the nations.

As to more general criticism, he will probably receive a larger portion of unqualified praise than any traveller for a century past. Perhaps no predecessor has combined so many requisites; no traveller was ever more vigilantly inquisitive, or saw more varieties of man and nature; excepting a very few instances of surpassing and barely justifiable though successful temerity, no traveller has displayed more enterprise and resolution; no traveller with a mind so pre-occupied with literature, has ever, as far as yet appears, gone out with less of prejudice and system, to be confirmed by and to pervert his observations; no traveller did or will narrate with a more elegant simplicity, or describe more luminously. It may be added, that the regions he surveyed were in some parts but very imperfectly, or properly not at all, known to us, and are in most parts interesting.

FAULTS OF TRAVELLERS.

When predicting a large share of unqualified praise, we need not say we have a reference to the conspicuous faults or defects in most of the distinguished travellers of the past century. Some of them have notoriously pursued their researches, and composed their books, in the express character of infidels. Some have vitiated the information they have supplied by an

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absurd nationality of spirit, or even the spirit of a mere political party. Others have regarded all mankind as purely so much material for making satires. Others in exploring, with noble enterprise, unknown and dangerous regions, have been materially deficient in the knowledge pre-requisite in order to elicit the knowledge which those regions might have afforded; or possessing all the intellectual requisites, they have given to their relations such a constant air of extravagance as to keep the reader in a perpetual state of unwilling suspicion, and leave the public mind requiring additional, and expecting opposite, evidence. The present traveller has left all such faults to their respective owners.

PICTURE OF RUSSIA.

With respect to Dr. Clarke's odious picture of Russia, its lines are so different from that unmeaning generality, and from that artificial distortion, by the one or the other of which fiction is betrayed; its minute touches have all so much character, that the internal evidence of truth, combined with the confidence which there could be no good reason for withholding from a man like Dr. Clarke, ought to be quite sufficient to give perfect authority to his representation. But there was a time, a very short way back in history, when even in spite of that verisimilitude which we can now perceive in his representation, and of the authority which his testimony derives from his character, we should have been all to a man enraged at such a description. For at that time, Russia was our grand co-operator in defence of social order and the Christian religion. We were all bounding from the earth with joy, at first hearing of the arrival, in the south of Europe, of the military Howard, the mild though energetic Suwarrow, to assist us in protecting the civilized world. against the threatened return of barbarism; every whiskered Scythian philanthropist in succession, down to Kutusof, has been the object of our affection and worship; the present autocrat was very lately our august and magnanimous ally;" and as to the mass of his subjects, it was impossible for us to dream of their character consisting of any other than the most generous and heroic qualities, while we contemplated their representative legions that came so far southward to exhibit the virtues of a Russian camp. But since this monarch

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and his heroic subjects so unaccountably grew cool in spite of all the fire at Austerlitz, and at last, for fear of drawing the same sort of heat to melt their own Moscovite snows, concluded to withdraw from our alliance, renounce even our friendship, and leave our cause to its fate, it is necessarily evident to us that the monarch is a coward, a simpleton, or worse, and all his people vile barbarians. We, therefore, shall all and every of us receive a representation like that of Dr. Clarke with such a violence of welcome as will soon banish all the apprehensions, which even the scrupulous and severe justice, apparent in these two judgments passed on the same people, might else have tended to inspire.

The general impression conveyed is, that the main body of the Russian population are in a strict sense heathens; that though they hear and utter some of the leading names and terms of revealed religion, they do not connect with them any of the ideas which revelation was intended to impart; that they have no more notion of Christianity as a system of doctrines, than they have of any ancient or modern scheme of metaphysics; that they are never permitted to look at the religion directly, but only see some distorted and fantastic reflections of a few of its memorable facts on the varnish and tinsel of superstitious pomp and ceremonies, the ecclesiastics being of no manner of use but to perform these ceremonies and consume the fruits of the earth; that an inconceivable degree of childishness and absurdity predominates throughout the ceremonial, and makes its most splendid and solemn exhibitions as ludicrous as those on the stage of a mountebank; and finally, that, as might be expected, the religion, so to call it, has scarcely any more salutary influence on the morals of the Russians, than if it were the coarse mythology of their ancestors. The only recommendation of this Greek church religion is, that it is admirably adapted for an alliance with the Russian state, by its tendency to fix and aggravate the base servility of the popular mind.

Very little is said by Dr. Clarke respecting the intellectual attainments of the clergy. Nor are we enabled to guess what proportion of the higher rank may have acquired, through the medium of French novels, and letters of the philosophes, so much of shallow infidelity, as at once to laugh at the mum