Chapter III: Part 3

A few years since some of the most strenuous opponents of railways were to be found among the squirearchy. "Why," argued these rural magnates, "should our woods be levelled and our corn-lands bisected, our game scared away and our parks disfigured by noise and smoke, to suit the convenience of the dingy denizens of Manchester, or the purse-proud merchants of Liverpool?" Similar arguments were urged not more than a century ago against the formation of new turnpike roads. The bittern, it was said, would be driven from his pool, the fox from his earth, the wild fowl would be frightened away from the marshes, and many a fine haunch of venison would be sent to London markets without the proper ceremonies of turning off and running down the buck. Merrie England could not exist without miry roads. In 1760 there was no turnpike road between the port of Lynn and the great corn and cattle market at Norwich. In 1762 an opulent gentleman, who had resided for a generation of mortal life in Lisbon, was desirous to revisit his paternal home among the meres of the eastern counties. His wish was further stimulated by the circumstance that his sister and sole surviving relative dwelt beside one of the great Broads, which, in these regions, penetrate far inland from the sea-coast. From London to the capital town of his native county his way was tolerably smooth and prosperous. The distance was about a hundred and ten miles, and by the aid of a mail coach he performed the journey in three days. But now commenced his real labours. Between his sister's dwelling and the provincial capital lay some twenty miles of alternate ridges of gravel and morass. Had he been a young man he might have walked safely and speedily under the guidance of some frugal swain or tripping dairymaid returning from market. Had he been a wise man he would have hired a nag, and trotted soberly along such bridle-roads as he found. But he was neither a young nor a wise man. His better years had been passed in the counting-houses of Santarem, and his bodily activity was impaired by long and copious infusions of generous old port. So, as he could neither walk nor ride, he deposited his portly and withal somewhat gouty person in a coach-and-six, and set forth upon his fraternal quest. He had little reason to plume himself upon the pomp and circumstance of his equipage. The six hired coach-horses, albeit of the strong Flanders breed, were in a few hours engulfed in a black pool; his coach, or rather his travelling mansion, was inextricably sunk in the same slimy hollow; and the merchant himself, whose journeys had hitherto been made on the sober back of a Lusitanian mule, was ignominiously dragged by two cowherds through his coach-windows,--and mounted on one of the wheelers, he was brought back, drenched and weary, to the place whence he set out. In high dudgeon, the purveyor of Bacchus returned to London, and could never be induced to resume the search of his "Anna soror."

Such imperfect means of transit materially affected both the manners and the intelligence of the age. Postal arrangements indeed existed, but of the rudest kind. It was common for letters to be left at the principal inns on the main road, to be delivered when called for. They remained often in the bar until the address was illegible, or smoke had dyed the paper a saffron-yellow. Special announcements of deaths and births or urgent business were necessarily entrusted to special messengers; and the title and superscription of these privately-sent letters generally contain very minute and even peremptory injunctions of a certain and swift delivery. But for such cautions, a rich uncle might have been quietly inurned without his expectant nephews hearing of his decease; and a whole college kept waiting, till the year of grace had passed, for the news of a fat rector's much-desired apoplexy. The death of good Queen Bess was not known in some of the remoter parishes of Devonshire until the courtiers of James had ceased to wear mourning for her. The Hebrews of York heard with quivering lips and ashen brows of the massacre of their people in London at Richard I.'s coronation, six weeks after it was perpetrated; and the churches of the Orkneys put up prayers for King James three months after the abdicated monarch had fled to St. Germain's. There was in nearly all rural districts the king of London and the king of the immediate neighbourhood. The Walpoles and Townshends in their own domains were far more formidable personages than George I.; and at a time when the King of Prussia's picture was commonly hung out at ale-house doors as an incitement to try the ale, {72} an ancient dame near Doncaster exclaimed, on being informed of his majesty's decease, "Lord a' mercy, is he! and, pray, who is to be the new Lord Mayor?"

A considerable improvement in the roads of Great Britain took place in the latter half of the preceding century. This change was partly owing to the advancing civilization of the larger towns and cities, and partly to the march of the Highlanders into England under Prince Charles Edward, in 1745. At that period communication was so imperfect that the Pretender had advanced a hundred miles from Edinburgh without exciting any peculiar alarm in the midland or southern counties, while in the metropolis itself no certain information could be obtained of the movements of the rebel army for some days after their departure southward. The Duke of Cumberland's march northward was much impeded by the difficulty of transporting his park of artillery. But after the decisive day of Culloden, the erection of Fort William, and the establishment of military posts at the foot of the Grampians, the expediency of readier communication between the capitals of South and North Britain was universally felt. Scotland could henceforward be held in permanent subordination only by means of good military highways. Accordingly in the year 1782 we find a German traveller (Moritz) speaking of the roads in the neighbourhood of London as "incomparable." He is astonished "how they got them so firm and solid;" and he thus describes his stage of sixteen miles from Dartford, the place of his disembarkation, to the metropolis:--

"Our little party now separated and got into two post-chaises, each
of which held three persons, though it must be owned that three
cannot sit quite so commodiously in these chaises as two; the hire of
a post-chaise is a shilling for every English mile. They may be
compared to our extra-posts, because they are to be had at all times.
But these carriages are very neat and lightly built, so that you
hardly perceive their motion, as they roll along these firm smooth
roads; they have windows in front and on both sides; the horses are
generally good, and the postilions particularly smart and active, and
always ride at a full trot. The one we had wore his hair cut short,
a round hat, and a brown jacket, of tolerably fine cloth, with a
nosegay in his bosom. Now and then, when he drove very hard, he
looked round, and with a smile seemed to solicit our approbation. A
thousand charming spots and beautiful landscapes, on which my eye
would long have dwelt with rapture, were now rapidly passed with the
speed of an arrow."

It was one of Samuel Johnson's wishes that he might be driven rapidly in a post-chaise, with a pretty woman, capable of understanding his conversation, for his travelling companion. The smartness of the English postboy was emulated in France,--not, as might have been expected, by his professional brethren, who until very recently retained their ponderous jackboots, three-cornered hats, and heavy knotted whips, but by the younger members of _la haute noblesse_. To look like an English jockey or postilion, was long the object of fashionable ambition with Parisian dandies. "Vous me crottez, Monsieur," said poor patient Louis XVI. to one of these exquisite centaurs, as he rode beside the royal carriage near Versailles. "Oui, Sire, a l'Anglaise," rejoined the self-satisfied dandy, understanding his majesty to have complimented his _trotting_ (_trottez_), and taking it as a tribute to the skill of his imitation.

Pedlars and packhorses were a necessary accompaniment of bad and narrow roads. The latter have long disappeared from our highways; the former linger in less-frequented districts of the country, but miserably shorn of their former importance. A licensed hawker is now a very unromantic personage. His comings and goings attract no more attention among the rustics or at the squire's hall than the passing by of a plough or a sheep. The fixed shop has deprived him of his utility, and daily newspapers of his attractions. He is content to sell his waistcoat or handkerchief pieces; but he is no longer the oracle of the village inn or the housekeeper's room. In the days however when neither draper's nor haberdasher's wares could be purchased without taking a day's journey at the least through miry ways to some considerable market-town, the pedlar was the merchant and newsman of the neighbourhood. He was as loquacious as a barber. He was nearly as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. He had his winter circuit and his summer circuit. He was as regular in the delivery of news as the postman; nay, he often forestalled that government official in bringing down the latest intelligence of a landing on the French coast; of an execution at Tyburn; of a meteor in the sky; of a strike at Spitalfields; and of prices in the London markets. He was a favourite with the village crones, for he brought down with him the latest medicines for ague, rheumatism, and the evil. He wrote love-letters for village beauties. He instructed alehouse politicians in the last speech of Bolingbroke, Walpole, or Pitt. His tea, which often had paid no duty, emitted a savour and fragrance unknown to the dried sloe-leaves vended by ordinary grocers. He was the milliner of rural belles. He was the purveyor for village songsters, having ever in his pack the most modern and captivating lace and ribbons, and the newest song and madrigal. He was competent by his experience to advise in the adjustment of top-knots and farthingales, and to show rustic beaux the last cock of the hat and the most approved method of wielding a cane. He was an oral 'Belle Assemblee.' He was full of "quips and cranks and wreathed smiles." 'Indifferent' honest, he was not the less welcome for being a bit of a picaroon. Autolycus, the very type of his profession,--and such as the pedlar was in the days of Queen Bess, such also was he in the days of George II.,--was littered under Mercury, and a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. His songs would draw three souls out of one weaver. His pack was furnished with

"Lawn, as white as driven snow;
Cyprus, black as e'er was crow;
Gloves, as sweet as damask roses,
Masks for faces and for noses;
Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady's chamber;
Golden quoifs and stomachers
For my lads to give their dears;
Pins and poking-sticks of steel,--
What maids lack from head to heel."

Then did he chant after the following fashion, at "holy-ales and festivals"--

"Will you buy any tape,
Or lace for your cape,
My dainty duck, my dear--a?
Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head,
Of the new'st and fin'st, fin'st wear--a?
Come to the pedlar,
Money's a meddler,
That doth alter all men's wear--a!"

One accident in pedlar life was some drawback to its general pleasantness. He often bore not only a great charge of goods, but of gold also. His steps were dogged by robbers, and many a skeleton, since disinterred in solitary places, is the mortal framework of some wandering merchant who had met with foul play on his circuit. The packman's ghost too is no unusual spectre in many of our shires.

How important a personage among the _dramatis personae_ of rural life the pedlar was, at even a recent period, in the northern counties of England, may be inferred from Wordsworth's choice of him for the hero of his 'Excursion.' Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But "the vagrant merchant under a heavy load," being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet's home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet's choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. Wordsworth's pedlar indeed was no Bryce Snailsfoot, nor Donald Bean, nor even such a one as was first cousin to Andrew Fairservice, but rather, by virtue of a poetic diploma, a philosopher of the ancient stamp. For

"From his native hills
He wandered far; much did he see of men,
Their manners, their enjoyments and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings; chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart,
That, 'mid the simpler forms of rural life
Exist more simple in their elements,
And speak a plainer language. In the woods,
A lone enthusiast, and among the fields,
Itinerant in this labour, he had passed
The better portion of his time; and there
Spontaneously had his affections thriven
Amid the bounties of the year, the peace
And liberty of nature; there he kept
In solitude and solitary thought,
His mind in a just equipoise of love."

Lucian, in his vision of Hades, beheld the Shades of the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian's hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and "imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay" a hawker of petty wares. It was easier to fit the shadows of monarchs with employment than it would be to find business for departed coachmen. "A coachman, Sir," said one of these worthies to ourselves, who was sorrowfully contemplating the approaching day of his extinction by a nearly completed railway,--"a coachman, if he really be one, is fit for nothing else. The hand which has from boyhood--or rather horsekeeper-hood--grasped the reins, cannot close upon the chisel or the shuttle. He cannot sink into a book-keeper, for his fingers could as soon handle a lancet as a pen. His bread is gone when his stable-door is shut." We attempted to console him by pointing out that it was a law of nature for certain races of mankind to become extinct. Were not the Red Men fading away before the sons of the White Spirit? Was not the Cornish tongue, and were not the old Cornish manners, for ever lost to earth, on the day when the old shrewish fishwife, Dolly Pentrath, departed this life towards the middle of the reign of King George III.? Seeing these things are so, and that "all beneath the moon doth suffer change," why should coachmen endure for ever? But our consolation was poured into deaf ears, and some two years afterwards we recognized our desponding Jehu under the mournful disfigurements of the driver of a hearse. The days of pedlars and stage-coachmen have reached their eve, and look not for restoration. They are waning into the Hades of extinct races, with the sumpnours and the limitours of the Canterbury Pilgrims.

We have described some of the difficulties and dangers to which travellers were subjected in the days of Old Roads. Yet the ancient Highways were not without their attending compensations. Pleasant it was to travel in company, as Chaucer voucheth: pleasant to linger by the way, as Montaigne testifies. To meditative and imaginative persons there was delight in sauntering through a fair country, viewing leisurely its rivers, meadows, hills, and towns. Burton prescribes travelling among his cures for melancholy, and he would not have recommended railway speed or even a fast coach to sad and timid men. His advice presupposed sober progress, gliding down rivers, patient winding round lofty hills, contemplation by woodsides and in green meadows, relaxation not tension of nerve and brain. "No better physick," he says, "for a melancholy man than change of aire and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions. Leo Afer speakes of many of his countrymen so cured without all other physick. No man, saith Lipsius, in an epistle to Phil. Lanoius, a noble friend of his, now ready to make a voyage, can be such a stock or stone, whom that pleasant speculation of countries, cities, towns, rivers, will not affect. For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled, a kinde of prisoner, and pity his case, that from his cradle to old age beholds the same still; insomuch that Rhasis doth not only commend but enjoyn travell, and such variety of objects to a melancholy man, and to lye in diverse innes, to be drawn into severall companies. A good prospect alone will ease melancholy, as Gomesius contends. The citizens of Barcino, saith he, are much delighted with that pleasant prospect their city hath into the sea, which, like that of old Athens, besides AEgina, Salamina, and other pleasant islands, had all the variety of delicious objects; so are those Neapolitanes and inhabitants of Genua, to see the ships, boats, and passengers go by, out of their windows, their whole cities being sited on the side of an hill like Pera by Constantinople. Yet these are too great a distance: some are especially affected with such objects as be near, to see passengers go by in some great road-way or boats in a river, _in subjectum forum despicere_, to oversee a fair, a market-place, or out of a pleasant window into some thoroughfare street to behold a continual concourse, a promiscuous rout, coming and going."

Indifferent roads and uneasy carriages, riding post, and dread of highwaymen, darkness or the inclemency of the seasons, led, as by a direct consequence, to the construction of excellent inns in our island. The superiority of our English hotels in the seventeenth century is thus described by the most picturesque of modern historians:--"From a very early period," says Mr. Macaulay, "the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard, in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry, above all the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. {82} In the seventeenth century, England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller sometimes in a small village lighted on a public-house, such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London. The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers. On the continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who crossed his threshold. In England he was a servant. Never was an Englishman more at home than when he took his ease in his inn.

"Many conveniences which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall
in the seventeenth century, are to be found in our modern hotels.
Yet on the whole it is certain that the improvement of our houses of
public entertainment has by no means kept pace with the improvement
of our roads and conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident
that, all other circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be
best where the means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate
of travelling, the less important is it that there should be numerous
agreeable resting-places for the travellers. A hundred and sixty
years ago a person who came up to the capital from a remote county
generally required twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or
six nights by the way. If he were a great man, he expected the meals
and lodging to be comfortable and even luxurious. At present we fly
from York or Chester to London by the light of a single winter's day.
At present therefore a traveller seldom interrupts his journey merely
for the sake of rest and refreshment. The consequence is that
hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into decay. In a short time
no good houses of that description will be found, except at places
where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure."

Highwaymen, pedlars, inns, coachmen, and well-appointed coaches have now nearly vanished from our roads. Some of the more excellent breeds of English horses have gone with them, or will soon follow them. In another generation no one will survive who has seen a Norfolk hackney. This race of sure-footed indefatigable trotters has already become so few in number that "a child may count them." "The oldest inhabitant"--that universal referee with some persons on all disputed points--never set eye on a genuine Flemish coach-horse in England; and the gallant high-stepping hybrid--half thoroughbred, half hackney--which whirled along the fast coaches at the rate of twelve miles in the hour will in a few years be nowhere found. The art of 'putting to' four horses in a few seconds will become one of the 'artes deperditae;' and the science of driving so as to divide equally the weight and the speed between the team, and to apportion the strength of the cattle to the variations of the road, will have become a tradition. Perfect as mechanism was the discipline of a well-trained leader. He knew the road, and the duty expected of him. Docile and towardly during his seven- or nine-mile stage, he refused to perform more than his allotted task. Attached to his yoke-fellow, he resented the intrusion of a stranger into his harness: and a mere change of hands on the box would often convert the willing steed into a recusant against the collar, whom neither soothing nor severity would induce to budge a step. Some suffering indeed has been spared to the equine world by the substitution of brass and iron for blood and sinews; but the poetry of the road is gone with the _quadrigae_ that a few years ago tripped lightly and proudly over the level of the Macadamized road. No latter-day Homer will again indite such a verse as

"[Greek text]."

The Four-in-hand Club is extinct, or, with those ancient charioteers at Troy, courses in Hades over meadows of asphodel.

Of the old roads of the Continent during the Dark and Middle Ages, we have little to record. The central energy of Rome had suffered collapse. Europe was partitioned into feeble kingdoms and powerful fiefs. War was the normal condition of its provinces; the sports of the field were unfavourable to agriculture, and directly opposed to the promotion of commerce and the growth of towns. So long as it was conducive to the pleasures of the manorial lord to keep large tracts of land uncultivated, it was contrary to his interests to form great thoroughfares. We have in the 'Tesoretto' of Brunetto a striking picture of the desolation of northern Spain in the thirteenth century. He thus describes his journey over the plain of Roncesvalles.

"There a scholar I espied,
On a bay mule that did ride.
Well away! what fearful ground
In that savage part I found.
If of art I aught could ken,
Well behoved me use it then.
More I look'd, the more I deem'd
That it wild and desert seem'd:
Not a road was there in sight;
Not a house and not a wight;
Not a bird and not a brute,
Not a rill, and not a root;
Not an emmet, not a fly,
Not a thing I mote descry:
Sore I doubted therewithal
Whether death would me befall.
Nor was wonder, for around
Full three hundred miles of ground,
Right across on every side
Lay the desert bare and wide." {87}

As Ser Brunetto was despatched on very urgent business, it may be presumed that he was journeying by the most direct road which he could find. Until the reign of Charlemagne indeed there were but few towns, and consequently few roads, in Germany. The population generally was widely spread over the surface of the land. "A house, with its stables and farm-buildings," says Mr. Hallam, "surrounded by a hedge or inclosure, was called a court, or as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage: the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a Pagus, or district." There was indeed little temptation or need to move from place to place, when nearly every article of consumption was produced or wrought at home. For several centuries there is perhaps not a vestige to be discovered of any considerable manufacture. Each district furnished for itself its own articles of common utility. Rich men kept domestic artizans among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their clothes made by the women upon their farms. The weaver, the smith, and the currier were often born and bred on the estate where they pursued their several crafts.

The position of Rome as the ecclesiastical metropolis of the world caused both a general and periodical recourse of embassies, deputations, pilgrims, and travellers to the Italian peninsula, yet we cannot discover that any especial conveniences were provided for the wayfarers. Even in the great and solemn years of the Jubilee the roads were merely patched up, and the bridges temporarily repaired by the Roman government, and only in such places as had become actually impassable. The floating capital of the more commercial of the Italian Republics was employed rather upon their docks and arsenals than upon their roads and causeways. Venice indeed, which for central vigour was the most genuine offspring of Imperial Rome, paved its continental possessions with broad thoroughfares. But neither Padua, Ravenna, nor Florence followed the example of the Adriatic Queen. On the contrary, Dante, when in his descent to Hell he meets with any peculiarly difficult or precipitous track, frequently compares it to some road well known to his countrymen, which fallen rocks had blocked up, or a wintry flood had rendered impermeable. Spain presented, as it presents at this day, to the engineer, almost insurmountable difficulties. The Moorish provinces of the south alone possessed any tolerable roads; nor were the ways of Arragon or Castile mended after the wealth of Mexico and Peru had been poured into the Spanish exchequer. Portugal owed its first good roads in modern times to its good king Emmanuel; and the Dutch and Flemings, the most commercial people of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, found in their rivers and canals an easier transit than roads would have afforded them, for the wares which they brought from Archangel on the one hand and from the Spice Islands on the other. The military restlessness of France indeed led to the earlier formation of great roads. Yet France was a land long divided in itself; and the Duchies of Burgundy and Bretagne had little in common with the enterprising spirit of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Upon the whole the roads of England, bad as they were, were at least upon a par with those of the Continent.

In this retrospect, hasty and imperfect as it is, we must not pass over the roads of Asia. And here ancient history affords us at least glimpses of definite knowledge. In that portion of the Asiatic continent which is seated between the Euxine Sea, the chain of Mount Taurus, and the AEgean, the crowded population, the activity of the Greek colonies, and the necessity for direct communication with the interior and seat of government, led to the construction of good and uniform highways. In the Ionian Revolt large bodies of troops were readily brought to bear upon the insurgents, and the preparations of Xerxes for his invasion of Greece cannot have been made without a previous provision of military roads. An exact scale of taxation was drawn up by Darius Hystaspes for all the provinces of his vast empire; and as the system survived the extinction of the royal house of Persia, and was adopted by the Macedonian conquerors in all its more important details, it may be inferred that such system worked with tolerable regularity and success. But as the tithes and tolls of Persia were paid both in money and in kind, it is obvious that the communication between the capital and satrapies of the empire must have been well organized. Such organization implies the existence of main roads radiating from Sousa and Ecbatana. Nor are we left to conjecture only. The establishment of running posts and couriers was a distinguishing feature of the Persian empire; and the speed at which they journeyed from the sea-coast or the banks of the Hyphasis to the seat of government proves that the roads were in good order and the stations and relays of runners well ascertained. The Anabasis of Cyrus--his "march up" the country--affords another proof. The narrative of Xenophon, in its earlier portions at least, and so long as the ten thousand Greeks kept to the main roads, resembles in the precision with which it marks distances and stations a Roman Itinerary or a Bradshaw's Guide. On this day, says the historical captain of mercenaries, we marched seven parasangs and bivouacked in an empty fort; on such a day we marched five parasangs and encamped in a pleasant park or 'paradise' of the great king. It is only after the Greeks have been forced from the 'Road-down' by the clouds of Persian cavalry, that they enter upon more rugged and devious mountain-paths. The account of Xenophon is confirmed by Arrian in his history of Alexander's Anabasis; and so long as the Macedonian conqueror was within the bounds of Persia proper, we rarely meet with any impediments to his progress arising out of the badness of the roads.

We have made some mention of the more conspicuous of ancient travellers. But travelling, either for business or pleasure, among the moderns, dates from the era of the Crusades. The barriers of the East were once again thrown open by that general ferment in the European world. Piety, the passion of enterprise, the dawning instincts of commerce, a new thirst for exotic luxuries, all contributed to inspire a desire for exploring the seats of the most ancient civilization. To this desire and to its effects we owe some of the most graphic and entertaining of modern writings. If we were, through any misadventure, sent to jail, we would stipulate for permission to carry into our cell Hakluyt's Voyages. The narratives of modern travellers are often learned, more often flimsy, and from the universality of locomotion, much given, like the prayers of the old Pharisees, to tedious repetitions. A tour in Greece or Italy now affects us with unutterable weariness. A journey from London to York affords more real novelty than many of these excursions. Sir Charles Fellows or Mr. Layard write in the spirit of the old travellers, and we would willingly wander any-whither with George Borrow. But, for the most part, the art of writing travels is lost--its imaginativeness, its credulity, its cherishing of mystery, and its proneness to awe. The old travellers are never sentimental--and sentiment is the very bane of road-books,--and they never describe for description's sake. The world was much too wonderful in their eyes for such unprofitable excursions of fancy. Beauty and danger, difficulty and strangeness, novel fashions and unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to them "as a banner broad unfurled," and inscribed with mystic signs and legends. They were not whirled about from place to place: they had leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery; they journeyed with their lives in their hands, and were often yoke-fellows with hunger and nakedness, and the fury of the elements. Luckily for us who read their narratives, they were most unscientific, and ascribed the howling of the night-wind, the bursting of icebergs, the noise of tempests, and the echoes that traverse boundless plains after great heats, or are imprisoned in rock and fell, to the voice of demons exulting or lamenting to each other. We now cross the desert with nearly as much ease as we hail an omnibus, or book ourselves for Paris. But such was not the spirit in which Marco Polo, in the thirteenth, century, traversed the wilderness of Lop.

"In the city of Lop," says the hardy and veracious merchant of
Venice, "they who desire to pass over the desert cause all
necessaries to be provided for them; and when victuals begin to fail
in the desert, they kill their camels and asses and eat them. They
mostly make it their choice to use camels, because they are sustained
with little meat, and bear great burdens. They must purvey victuals
for a month to cross it only, for to go through it lengthways would
require a year's time. They go through the sands and barren
mountains, and daily find water; yet at times it is so little that it
will hardly suffice fifty or a hundred men with their beasts; and in
three or four places the water is salt and bitter. The rest of the
road, for eight-and-twenty days, is very good. In it there are not
either beasts or birds; they say that there dwell many spirits in
this wilderness, which cause great and marvellous illusions to
travellers, and make them perish; for if any stay behind, and cannot
see his company, he shall be called by his name, and so going out of
the way be lost. {94a} In night they hear as it were the noise of a
company, which, taking to be theirs, they perish likewise. Concerts
of musical instruments are sometimes heard in the air, like noise of
drums and armies. {94b} They go therefore close together, hang bells
on their beasts' neck, and set marks, if any stray."

The Hebrews, dispersed over every region of the world, civilized or uncivilized, were necessarily great travellers. There was, in the first place, their central connection with Palestine, which they generally visited once in their lives, and whither thousands of them, as age advanced, flocked to lay their bones. There were the claims of kindred, prompting them to seek out and visit the children of dispersion, whether seated on the banks of the Vistula, the Euphrates, or the Nile; and there were the incentives of commerce, which drew them through the perils of land and sea. From the instructions given to their travelling agents in the medieval period, we derive much curious information respecting the internal state of Europe. It were indeed much to be wished that competent Hebrew scholars, instead of devoting themselves to the inane obscurity of the Rabbins, would employ their learning upon the history of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Much curious and interesting knowledge might be disinterred from the piles of Hebrew manuscripts that now lie amid the dust and spiders' webs of the Escurial. Above all things the itineraries of the Jewish travellers should be explored, as containing probably the most minute and accurate description of the social state of Europe at that period. Both for their personal security and for the despatch of their affairs, it was essential for the Jews to obtain and circulate the most exact information of the markets and population of the cities on their route. They required to know whom to shun and whom to seek; the towns in which the Jews' quarter was most commodious and secure; and the intervening tracts, often many days' journey in extent, which were most free from robbers or feudal oppressors. The following draft of instructions for a Spanish Jew, whose occasions led him from Spain to Greece, will afford the reader some conception of the historical value of such itineraries. Its date is apparently not later than the sixteenth century:--

"Whoever wants to go from Saragossa, Huesca, Teruel, or any other
town in Arragon, to Constantinople, the great city where the Turk
reigns, must follow the route herein contained, and beware of the
dangers that we are going to specify. The fugitive must first of all
go to Jaca, where they will ask him the object of his voyage; he must
say that he escapes to France, on account of his creditors, and he
will not be disturbed. Thence he will go to Canfranc, and thence to
Oleron, the first town in France, where, if questioned respecting the
object of his voyage, he must say that he is going on a pilgrimage to
Our Lady of Loretto. From Oleron to Pau, to Tarbes, to Toulouse, to
Gaillac, to Villefranche, and to Lyons: in this latter place the
traveller will be obliged to show whatever money he carries, and pay
one out of every forty pieces, whether silver or gold. At Lyons he
will ask his way to Milan, and say that he is going to visit St. Mark
of Venice; but when within five leagues of the former city, he must
leave it on the right, and pass behind the mountain, so as not to
enter the territory of the emperor. From thence he must direct his
course towards the State of Venice; and when he arrives at Verona,
not go through the city, for they make every one pay one real at the
gates. In Verona he must ask his way to Padua, where he will embark
on the river and go to Venice; the passage will cost him half a real.
He will land on the Piazza di San Marco, and then he must look out
for an inn to go to; he must be cautious in making his bargain with
the innkeeper first; he must not pay more than half a real a day for
his bed; and he is warned not to let the landlord provide him with
anything, for he will charge him double for everything. On the day
after his arrival he must go to the Piazza di San Marco, and there he
will see some men with white turbans, and others with yellow; the
first are Turks, the latter Jews. From these he will get every
assistance and advice, whether he wants to go to Salonica or to any
port of Greece."

At the time when Marco Polo, Rubruquis, Benjamin of Tudela, etc., journeyed in Asia, the East was still unspoiled--it was still the authentic Ophir of gold and barbaric pearl, and gorgeous armour, and solemn processions. At the same time Asia was but little behind Europe in the general elements of civilization, so that the contrast which is so glaring at the present day, between the state of a sultan and a pasha, and the squalid poverty of his subjects and servants, was then less startling. The courts of Europe were comparatively poor and mean, while the palaces of the oriental monarchs powerfully affected the imagination of the traveller. At a time too when the manners of the European nobility exhibited little refinement, the dignified courtesy and elaborate ceremonies of Bagdad and Ispahan were not less imposing than the pomp and splendour of their garb and its decorations. The Eastern chivalry also was to the full as efficient as that of the West; for what it lacked in weight of metal, it gained in superior adroitness in the use of weapons, in the greater facility of its movements, and the better temper and flexibility of its armour. All these features of a high--though, as it proved, a less enduring--civilization are noted with wonder and applause by the early travellers, who cannot sufficiently express their admiration of such opulence and such brilliant displays.

But for our immediate purpose, we can only speak of the great roads and inns of "Cathaian Khan." Marco Polo thus describes the great roads and excellent inns in the neighbourhood of Cambalu.

"There are many public roads from the city of Cambalu, which conduct
to the neighbouring provinces, and in every one of them, at the end
of five-and-twenty or thirty miles, are lodgings or inns built,
called _lambs_, that is, post-houses, with large and fair courts,
chambers furnished with beds and other provisions, every way fit to
entertain great men, nay, even to lodge a king. The provisions are
laid in from the country adjacent: there are about four hundred
horses, which are in readiness for messengers and ambassadors, who
there leave their tired horses, and take fresh; and in mountainous
places, where are no villages, the Great Khan sends people to
inhabit, about ten thousand at a place, where these lambs or
post-houses are built, and the people cultivating the ground for
their provisions. These excellent regulations continue unto the
utmost limits of the empire, so that, on the public ways throughout
the whole of the Khan's dominions, about ten thousand of the king's
inns are found; and the number of the horses appointed for the
service of the messengers in those inns are more than two hundred
thousand--a thing almost incredible: hence it is that in a little
while, with change of men and horses, intelligence comes, without
stop, to the court. The horses are employed by turns, so that of the
four hundred, two hundred are in the stables ready, the other two
hundred at grass, each a month at a time. Their cities also, that
are adjoining to rivers and lakes, are appointed to have ferry-boats
in readiness for the posts, and cities on the borders of deserts are
directed to have horses and provisions for the use of such as pass
through those deserts: and they have a reasonable allowance for this
service from the Khan. In cases of great moment the posts will ride
two hundred miles a-day, or sometimes two hundred and fifty. Also
they ride all night, foot-posts running by them with lights, if the
moon does not shine.

"There are also between these inns other habitations, three or four
miles distant from one another, in which there are a few houses,
where foot-posts live, having each of them his girdle hung full of
shrill-sounding bells. These keep themselves always ready, and as
often as the Khan's letters are sent to them convey them speedily to
the posts at the next village, who, hearing the sound of the
foot-post coming when at a distance, expect him and receive his
letters, and presently carry them to the next watch; and so, the
letters passing through several hands, are conveyed, without delay,
to the place whither they ought to come; and it often happens that by
this the king learns news, or receives new fruits, from a place ten
days' journey distant, in two days. As, for instance, fruits growing
at Cambalu in the morning, by the next day at night are at Xanadu."

Such were the general features of the old roads of Asia and Europe centuries ago. But it must be regarded as one of the caprices of civilization that the only roads, in the fifteenth century, which rivalled the Roman Viae, were constructed in another hemisphere, and by a people whom the Europeans were wont to regard with disdain, as barbarous. The gold and silver furniture of the Peruvian palaces excited the cupidity of the Spanish invaders; but even avarice, for a moment, yielded to admiration, when the file-leaders of Pizarro's columns beheld for the first time the great Roads of the Incas. The Peruvians have been eloquently vindicated from the charge of barbarism by a modern historian, native of the great continent which Columbus discovered. From the moment when Cortes had gained the crest of the sierra of Ahualco, his progress was comparatively easy. Broad and even roads or long and solid causeways across the lakes and marshes conducted the Spaniards and their allies through the valley of Mexico or Tenochtitlan; and as they descended from the regions of sleet and snow, a gay and gorgeous panorama greeted them on every side, "of water, woodland, and cultivated plains," diversified with bold and shadowy hills, and studded with the roofs and towers of populous cities. The running posts of the Aztecs rivalled in speed and regularity their brethren in Cathay, and Montezuma could boast that his dominions displayed at least one element of civilization--rapid communication between the provinces and the capital--which in that age and long afterwards was unknown to the empire of his rival and conqueror, the 'white king beyond the seas.' The roads of Peru were however more wonderful than even those of Mexico. We now borrow Mr. Prescott's description.

"Those," he says, "who may distrust the accounts of Peruvian
industry, will find their doubts removed on a visit to the country.
The traveller still meets, especially in the regions of the
tableland, with memorials of the past, remains of temples, palaces,
fortresses, terraced mountains, great military roads, aqueducts, and
other public works, which, whatever degree of science they may
display in their execution, astonish him by their number, the massive
character of the materials, and the grandeur of the design. Among
them, perhaps the most remarkable are the great roads, the broken
remains of which are still in sufficient preservation to attest their
former magnificence. There were many of their roads traversing
different parts of the kingdom; but the most considerable were the
two which extended from Quito to Cuzco, and again diverging from the
capital, continued in a southern direction towards Chili.

"One of these roads passed over the grand plateau, and the other
along the lowlands on the borders of the ocean. The former was much
the more difficult achievement, from the character of the country.
It was conducted over pathless sierras buried in snow; galleries were
cut for leagues through the living rock; rivers were crossed by means
of bridges that swung suspended in the air; precipices were scaled by
stair-ways hewn out of the native bed; ravines of hideous depth were
filled up with solid masonry: in short, all the difficulties that
beset a wild and mountainous region, and which might appal the most
courageous engineer of modern times, were encountered and
successfully overcome. The length of the road, of which scattered
fragments only remain, is variously estimated at from fifteen hundred
to two thousand miles, and stone pillars, in the manner of European
milestones, were erected at stated intervals of somewhat more than a
league, all along the route.

"The other great road of the Incas lay through the level country
between the Andes and the ocean. It was constructed in a different
manner, as demanded by the nature of the ground, which was for the
most part low, and much of it sandy. The causeway was raised on a
high embankment of earth, and defended on either side by a parapet or
wall of clay; and trees and odoriferous shrubs were placed along the
margin, regaling the sense of the traveller with their perfume, and
refreshing him by their shade, so grateful under the burning sky of
the tropics. In the midst of sandy wastes, which occasionally
intervened, where the light and volatile soil was incapable of
sustaining a road, huge piles were driven into the ground to indicate
the route of the traveller."

Mr. Prescott might have added, that these magnificent works were constructed by a people ignorant of the use of iron, and unsupplied with wheel-carriages. The only beast of burden was the llama; and the long files of these patient and docile animals, winding along the broad causeways of the Andes recalled to the invaders the long strings of mules stepping in single file along the rocky paths cut out from the sides of the Iberian sierras. Iron and fire-arms alone were wanting to the Peruvians to enable them to rival the most potent of the European kingdoms both in the arts and arms which maintain empires.

Of New Roads we shall speak very briefly, and rather of their effects than of their history. It would indeed be idle, in a rapid sketch like the present, to be diffuse upon a subject which those who travel may study with their own eyes, and those who stay at home may learn from many excellent recent books. {104}

The defiance of natural obstacles, the massive piles of masonry, the filling up of valleys, the perforated hill, the arch bestriding the river or the morass, the attraction of towns towards the line of transit, the creation of new markets, the connection of inland cities with the coast, the interweaving of populations hitherto isolated from one another, the increase of land-carriage, the running to and fro of thousands whose fathers were born and died in the same town or the same district,--all these are features in common with the Flaminian and AEmilian ways, and with the roads laid down by the genius and enterprise of Stephenson. The old and the new roads, both in their resemblance and in their difference, suggest and express many of the organic distinctions and affinities of the old and the new phases of civilization.