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THE Τ BUE TBAVELLEB AND LITEBATUBE 7 And this reminds me that I may as well explain the allusion, which I made at starting, and which may perhaps have sounded contemptuous, to ancient art, and the temper of the professional student. I meant by it nothing disrespectful to literature generally ; indeed, how could the traveller whose pleasure is in contemplating the past be indifferent to that through which the past is mainly apprehended ? Such a traveller values literature quite as much as the student does. I only mean that he values it in a different way. The professional student, no matter how distinguished, is, after all, merely a maker of roads for the minds of others to travel on as far and as luxuriously as possible : but the student himself, with his spectacles, cannot realise this or see that his work means nothing but the convenience of post-chaises ; and the difference between him and the traveller may be bluntly expressed as follows : that he cares only for making the roads, and the traveller cares only for using them. The traveller is sensible of the importance of exact history ; the traveller is sensitive to all the magic of poetry : but facts and dates, as he moves from one historical place to another, are for him merely so many sticks on which to train the tendrils of his imagination ; and poetry appeals to him only in so far as it melts into the moonlight, as it peoples again old cities and gardens, and fills the air with echoes of lutes that have long been silent. He values literature for these reasons only ; but

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