Nothing like travel to dispel prejudice and romance. People are too apt to adopt Byron's notions of the East. To those who would have their eyes opened we recommend the Mediterranean steamers, or, if these would take them too far, they may stay at home and read Mr Smith.
"Travel," such is his advice to the seeker after truth, "with a determination to be only affected by things as they strike you. Swiss girls, St Bernard dogs, Portici fishermen, the Rhine, Nile travelling, and other objects of popular rhapsodies, fearfully deteriorate upon practical acquaintance. Few tourists have the courage to say that they have been 'bored,' or at least disappointed by some conventional lion. They find that Guide-books, Diaries, Notes, Journals, &c. &c., all copy one from the other in their enthusiasm about the same things; and they shrink from the charge of vulgarity, or lack of mind, did they dare to differ. Artists and writers _will_ study effect rather than graphic truth. The florid description of some modern book of travel is as different to the actual impressions of ninety-nine people out of a hundred--allowing all these to possess average education, perception, and intellect--when painting in their minds the same subject, as the artfully tinted lithograph, or picturesque engraving of the portfolio or annual, is to the faithful photograph."
Mr Smith's concluding chapter, including his lazaretto experiences and departure for Egypt, is very amusing, and he shows up the abuses of the quarantine system, his own annoyances when in sickly durance, and the eccentricities of his Mahometan and Christian fellow-travellers, with spirit and humour. We have good will, but no space, to accompany him further in his peregrinations. An appendix, including estimates of expenses, and various remarks suggested by his recent travelling experience, will be found useful by persons contemplating a similar trip. The general texture of his book is certainly of the slightest; but, as already implied, it pretends not to solidity or to the discussion of grave topics. It is just such a volume as might be composed by the amalgamation of a series of epistles from a lively and fluent letter-writer to friends at home, during a few weeks' ramble and abode in Turkey. If it occasionally reminds us of Cockaigne, its author, we are sure, is too patriotic to be ashamed of his native village, and we have no mind to quarrel with him for the almost exclusively metropolitan character of his tropes and similes, for his frequent reminiscences of London streets and Surrey hills, or for his preference of the sunset seen from "The Cricketers" at Chertsey Bridge, to the same sight from "The little Burial-ground" at Pera. A good result--probably the one he aimed at--of the selection, as points of comparison, of localities more particularly familiar to Londoners, is that he thereby conveys, to those who will doubtless form a very large proportion of his readers, a clear idea of the places he visited and would describe. And his little volume affords evidence of good temper and feeling sufficient to cover a multitude of Cockneyisms.