)
And being thus equipped, I began to think that it was time that I
should attempt _a book_. During a previous hurried scamper in Normandy
I had just a glimpse of Brittany, which greatly excited my desire to
see more of it. So I pitched on a tour in Brittany as the subject of
my first attempt.
Those were happy days, when all the habitable globe had not been
run over by thousands of tourists, hundreds of whom are desirous of
describing their doings in print--not but that the notion, whether
a publisher's or writer's notion, that new ground is needed for the
production of a good and amusing book of travels, is other than a
great mistake. I forget what proposing author it was, who in answer
to a publisher urging the fact that "a dozen writers have told us all
about so and so," replied, "But _I_ have not told you what _I_ have
seen and thought about it." But if I had been the publisher I should
at once have asked to see his MS. The days when a capital book may be
written on a _voyage autour de ma chambre_ are as present as ever they
were. And "A Summer Afternoon's Walk to Highgate" might be the subject
of a delightful book if only the writer were the right man.
Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh
ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population
offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist. All this is
now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of
sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of
life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by
the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in
its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a
dead level of uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character,
manners, and peculiarities.
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