So far, then, from the hoard of happiness being small, every country proclaims itself to be specially and pre-eminently blest. The philosophic poet has no reason for his sorrow: he wanted one happy spot, and he has found every spot is happy—supremely happy. But the apparent incongruity vanishes on a closer examination. Each nation boasts its pre-eminence over other nations; but man nowhere boasts much of being man. Every people is proud and self-congratulatory whilst it compares itself with other people; but its pride and gratulation are only sustained by this comparison. Every congregation of men who merely contemplate themselves as with the earth beneath them, and the sky above, are heard to fill the air with lamentations and discontent. So that the philosopher, notwithstanding these several vaunts of every nation, civilised and savage, may still search, if he thinks fit, for the spot “to happiness consigned.” Our poet seems to find an equal proportion of good and evil in every clime, people, and government. Sometimes he is guilty of a little overcharge in this or that particular, in order to keep the balance even. Only thus can we account for the very severe language with which he takes leave of Holland. He had found the people of that country so very comfortable that it was absolutely necessary to abuse them as— “A land of tyrants and a den of slaves,” or the due proportion of evil would not have been preserved. It is observable, and characteristic of the age in which Goldsmith wrote, that, beautiful as are his descriptions of the several countries of Europe, there is very little in them which betrays that he himself had ever visited those countries. There are few of those picturesque circumstances which the eye of an observer detects, and which the memory, or the note-book, preserves. Unfortunately, it was the habit of the day to trust more to the knowledge acquired from books than to the eyesight: _learning_ had not lost that undue influence which it naturally acquired at the restoration of letters; poets chose rather to describe what had been described before, and adhere to traditional feelings and classical models, than to consult their own experience. The descriptions of scenery in _The Traveller_ are so general, and consist of broad outlines so well known to all educated men, that they might have been written in Green Arbour Court, by one who had lived there all his life. Switzerland itself does not provoke him to quit the beaten track of broad generalities. He even describes what he did _not_ see, because it harmonises with the ideas obtained from books. Thus,— —“The bleak Swiss their stormy mansion tread, And force a churlish soil for scanty bread; No produce _here_ the barren hills afford, But man and steel, the soldier and his sword.”