Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon | Page 6

a genius you have long admired, than
have it patched by a different hand, by which means the marks of its
true author might have been effaced. That the success of the last written,
though first published, volume of the author's posthumous pieces may
be attended with some convenience to those innocents he hath left
behind, will no doubt be a motive to encourage its circulation through
the kingdom, which will engage every future genius to exert itself for
your pleasure. The principles and spirit which breathe in every line of
the small fragment begun in answer to Lord Bolingbroke will
unquestionably be a sufficient apology for its publication, although
vital strength was wanting to finish a work so happily begun and so
well designed. PREFACE THERE would not, perhaps, be a more
pleasant or profitable study, among those which have their principal
end in amusement, than that of travels or voyages, if they were wrote as
they might be and ought to be, with a joint view to the entertainment
and information of mankind. If the conversation of travelers be so
eagerly sought after as it is, we may believe their books will be still
more agreeable company, as they will in general be more instructive
and more entertaining. But when I say the conversation of travelers is
usually so welcome, I must be understood to mean that only of such as
have had good sense enough to apply their peregrinations to a proper
use, so as to acquire from them a real and valuable knowledge of men
and things, both which are best known by comparison. If the customs
and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be no
office so dull as that of a traveler, for the difference of hills, valleys,
rivers, in short, the various views of which we may see the face of the
earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of his labor; and
surely it would give him very little opportunity of communicating any
kind of entertainment or improvement to others.
To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is
necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should
have overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more
than a great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore
the traveler, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to
find everywhere subjects worthy of his notice. It is certain, indeed, that

one may be guilty of omission, as well as of the opposite extreme; but a
fault on that side will be more easily pardoned, as it is better to be
hungry than surfeited; and to miss your dessert at the table of a man
whose gardens abound with the choicest fruits, than to have your taste
affronted with every sort of trash that can be picked up at the
green-stall or the wheel-barrow. If we should carry on the analogy
between the traveler and the commentator, it is impossible to keep one's
eye a moment off from the laborious much-read doctor Zachary Gray,
of whose redundant notes on Hudibras I shall only say that it is, I am
confident, the single book extant in which above five hundred authors
are quoted, not one of which could be found in the collection of the late
doctor Mead.
As there are few things which a traveler is to record, there are fewer on
which he is to offer his observations: this is the office of the reader; and
it is so pleasant a one, that he seldom chooses to have it taken from him,
under the pretense of lending him assistance. Some occasions, indeed,
there are, when proper observations are pertinent, and others when they
are necessary; but good sense alone must point them out. I shall lay
down only one general rule; which I believe to be of universal truth
between relator and hearer, as it is between author and reader; this is,
that the latter never forgive any observation of the former which doth
not convey some knowledge that they are sensible they could not
possibly have attained of themselves.
But all his pains in collecting knowledge, all his judgment in selecting,
and all his art in communicating it, will not suffice, unless he can make
himself, in some degree, an agreeable as well as an instructive
companion. The highest instruction we can derive from the tedious tale
of a dull fellow scarce ever pays us for our attention. There is nothing, I
think, half so valuable as knowledge, and yet there is nothing which
men will give themselves so little trouble to attain; unless it be, perhaps,
that lowest degree of it which is the object of curiosity, and which hath
therefore that