|WHEN, in 1768, the yet undistinguished the world his 'Journal of a Tour to Corsica,' Gray wrote to Horace Walpole from Pembroke College that the book had strangely pleased and moved him. Then, with the curious contempt for the author which that egregious personage seems to have inspired in so many of his contemporaries, Gray goes on: 'The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' This is an utterance which suggests that sometimes even the excellent critic Mr. Gray, like the Sage of Gough Square, 'talked James Boswell of Auchinleck gave to laxly.' At all events this particular example scarcely illustrates his position. There was more than mere veracity in Boswell's method. Conscious or unconscious, his faculty for reproducing his impressions effectively, and his thoroughly individual treatment of his material, are far more nearly akin to genius than folly. Nor could his success be said to be a matter of chance, since on two subsequent occasions--in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' and the 'Life of Johnson'--he not only repeated that success, but carried further towards perfection those fortunate characteristics which he had exhibited at first. Walpole, if we may trust the title-page of the 'little lounging miscellany' known as 'Walpoliana,' reported his friend's dictum with greater moderation. 'Mr. Gray the poet has often observed to me, that, if any person were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever hands, prove a most useful and entertaining one.' As a generalisation, this leaves nothing to be desired. That the unaffected record of ordinary experiences, 'honestly set down,' is seldom without its distinctive charm, needs no demonstration; and when lapse of time has added its grace of remoteness, the charm is heightened. These considerations must serve as our excuse for recalling a half-forgotten 'pamphlet'--as Gray would have styled it--which points the moral of his amended aphorism far better than Boswell's 'Tour.' The narrative of Charles P. Moritz's 'Travels, chiefly on Foot, through several Parts of England,' belongs to 1782. It was first published at Berlin in 1783, and the earliest English version is dated 1795. The second edition (now before us) came two years later, and other issues are occasionally met with in booksellers' catalogues; besides which, John Pinkerton, the compiler of the 'Walpoliana' above mentioned, included the book in the second volume of his 'Collections of Voyages,' et.c., and Mayor also reprinted it in vol. ix. of his 'British Tourist.' * * It is also included, with some omissions, in Cassell's excellent 'National Library.'