stupid savage of New Holland or the Terra

del Fuego.

The eagerness with which the public have always received the accounts of travellers has naturally contributed to their multiplication. It is to be regretted, however, that this eagerness is too frequently so indiscriminate that almost nothing is so very insipid that it will not be devoured in the shape of travels. Hence the numerous productions which have appeared of late without adding any thing to our stock of information. No individual now who has left the bounds of our own island, hesitates a moment about the qualifications necessary for his appearance before the public at his return. His previous education, his means of access to proper sources of information, and his leisure to acquire it, are objects of inferior concern. He has travelled, and that is enough.

M. de Humboldt belongs to a higher order

of travellers, to whom the public have of late been very little accustomed. We must place him beside a Nieubuhr, a Pallas, a Bruce, a Chardin, a Barrow, and a Volney; and his works will probably be long consulted as authorities respecting the countries which he describes. He seems to be a stranger to few departments of learning or science; and his fortune enabled him to provide himself with every thing which could most advance his pursuits, and to make that appearance among persons of rank and authority necessary to remove the obstacles in the way of a traveller in every country, but most of all in a country under an arbitrary government.

The work of which a translation is here offered to the public was submitted to a very severe trial: the sketch of it was freely communicated to the natives of New Spain, and underwent the examination of the Spanish government. It may be doubted,

however, whether the accuracy and fulness of information which such a measure has a tendency to procure might not be counterbalanced by seemingly unavoidable disadvantages. We never talk of our friends so candidly before their faces as behind their backs. In the former case we may say nothing but the truth, but we are seldom disposed to say the whole truth. He must be a very honest traveller indeed who communicates all the remarks which occur to him to the people among whom he is travelling. Even Dr. Johnson, with all his bluntness, would have hesitated to read his Tour to the Hebrides to his Scotch landlords.

There is one disadvantage indeed almost inseparable from the mode in which M. de Humboldt appears to have been treated in the new world. He received so much attention both from public men and private individuals during his stay in Mexico, that

he could hardly avoid displaying some

We ac

portion of gratitude in return. cordingly find him exceedingly prone to give favourable accounts of all the individuals of that country whom he has occasion to mention. He is profuse in his compliments to their learning, science, and their other good qualities, and nothing ever appears to shade the picture. We may easily conceive, therefore, that he must have seen both in individuals and institutions much more that met with his disapprobation than he has chosen to communicate.

M. de Humboldt has brought forward a great mass of information regarding New Spain, a country of which we before knew very little indeed. Let the specious paragraphs of our celebrated countryman Robertson be attentively weighed, and we shall be astonished to find how little specific information they sometimes really contain. The present work, however, furnishes us

with precise data on a very great variety of important subjects. Yet it is to be regretted that the author could not throw occasionally more rapidity into his descriptions, and give somewhat more condensation to his materials. He is sometimes rather apt to indulge in repetition, and to swell his accounts with circumstances by no means essential to be told, but which have a necessary tendency to fatigue the attention of the reader. This failing is not peculiar to M. de Humboldt, but is common to him with too many authors, and particularly those of his own country, Germany. Indeed the faculty of selecting the more important and leading features of an object is, perhaps, the rarest and most valuable which any writer can possess. It is this which communicates such a charm to the history of Hume, and arrests so strongly our attention in the travels of Volney.

But whatever may be the sentiments of