Voyages and Travels indeed are no barren ground; and you must seldom let a Number of your _Review_ go abroad without an Article of this description. The charm of this species of writing, so universally felt, arises chiefly from its uniting Narrative with Information. The interest we take in the story can only be kept alive by minute incident and occasional detail; which puts us in possession of the traveller's feelings, his hopes, his fears, his disappointments, and his pleasures. At the same time the thirst for knowledge and love of novelty is gratified by continual information respecting the people and countries he visits. If you wish therefore to run down the book, you have only to play off these two parts against each other. When the Writer's object is to satisfy the first inclination, you are to thank him for communicating to the World such valuable facts as, whether he lost his way in the night, or sprained his ankle, or had no appetite for his dinner. If he is busied about describing the Mineralogy, Natural History, Agriculture, Trade, etc. of a country: you may mention a hundred books from whence the same information may be obtained; and deprecate the practice of emptying old musty Folios into new Quartos, to gratify that sickly taste for a smattering about everything which distinguishes the present Age. In Works of Science and recondite Learning, the task you have undertaken will not be so difficult as you may imagine. Tables of Contents and Indexes are blessed helps in the hands of a Reviewer; but, more than all, the Preface is the field from which his richest harvest is to be gathered. In the Preface, the Author usually gives a summary of what has been written on the same subject before; he acknowledges the assistance he has received from different sources, and the reasons of his dissent from former Writers; he confesses that certain parts have been less attentively considered than others, and that information has come to his hands too late to be made use of; he points out many things in the composition of his Work which he thinks may provoke animadversion, and endeavours to defend or palliate his own practice. Here then is a fund of wealth for the Reviewer, lying upon the very surface. If he knows anything of his business, he will turn all these materials against the Author: carefully suppressing the source of his information; and as if drawing from the stores of his own mind long ago laid up for this very purpose. If the Author's references are correct, a great point is gained; for by consulting a few passages of the original Works, it will be easy to discuss the subject with the air of having a previous knowledge of the whole.