His whole subsequent career is but a variation on the themes of 1846 and 1850. He went everywhere,--to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor (1851–52); to Spain and India, then on to China, where he joined Perry’s expedition to Japan (1853). He was in Germany, Norway, and Lapland in 1856, in Greece in 1857–58, in Russia in 1862–63 (where for a while he held the post of secretary of legation), in Switzerland, the Pyrenees, and Corsica in 1868, and in Egypt and Iceland in the same year (1874). All his adventures were transmuted into books: _A Journey to Central Africa_, 1854; _The Lands of the Saracen_, 1854; _A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853_, 1855; _Northern Travel_, 1857; _Travels in Greece and Russia_, 1859; _At Home and Abroad_, 1859; _At Home and Abroad_, ‘second series,’ 1862; _Colorado_, 1867; _By-Ways of Europe_, 1869; _Egypt and Iceland_, 1874. A part of the great success of these books was due to causes far from literature. Doubtless, if written to-day, the volumes would be read, but it were idle to suppose that they could have the vogue they enjoyed in the Fifties. The American public of a half-century ago was not nomadic. It had few ways of gratifying its thirst for knowledge of foreign lands. Photographs were so expensive that one seldom ran the risk of being obliged to sit down with a friend ‘just back from Europe’ to admire such novelties as the Leaning Tower and the Bridge of Sighs. The oxyhydrogen stereopticon was imperfect, the panorama clumsy and ill-painted. Therefore the writings of a man who had the knack of telling agreeably what he had seen were most welcome. The home-keeping public enjoyed also hearing the traveller talk. When Taylor lectured (for he became one of the most popular lecturers of the day) they crowded the hall and thought two hours of him not long enough. Timeliness, however, does not explain all the success of _Views Afoot_ and its companion volumes. Taylor was an excellent writer even when he wrote most hastily. If his word-pictures were often highly colored, they possessed, among other virtues, the great virtue of having been painted on the spot. Through their aid one could really see what Taylor had himself seen.