Many persons of small incomes; many who wish to retrench their expenses, but are ashamed of doing so at home; some for the purpose of having wine and fruit at a cheaper rate; and some for the sake of a better climate,--pass several years abroad, fixed at the place of their first choice, or travelling but little, and at great intervals of time. The economical residents abroad seldom proceed further from home than to the towns near the southern shore of the channel, and to those on the banks of the Loire. Some parents take their children abroad to enable them to acquire the use of those living languages, which, though very generally taught, are very rarely learned in England. Excluded from the greater part of the continent of Europe during twenty years of revolution and of war, English travellers had been obliged to waste their activity in voyages to the western isles of Scotland, or in picturesque tours to the Giant's Causeway, or the Lake of Killarney: some cooled their ardour amid the snows of Scandinavia, and others roused their classical enthusiasm by the view of Salamis and Thermopylæ: some measured the Pyramids of Egypt, others performed pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The peace of Amiens opened to them, though but for a few short months, the road to Paris, and the gallery of the Louvre, enriched with the spoils of nations. It is not forgotten how, on the rupture of that peace, they were arrested, throughout the whole extent of the French republic and its dependencies, and detained as prisoners of war, in reprisal of the seizure of French ships and citizens throughout the maritime empire of England: succeeding English travellers, twelve years later, remembered it well: the crowds, again attracted to Paris on the restoration of the king, fled in all directions on the landing of Napoleon from Elba. "Pourquoi me fuient-ils?" said he: "je ne me répète pas."[4] Perhaps the outlawry fulminated against him by the congress of Vienna would have been as good a reason for doing again what he had done before, as the sweeping the seas without declaration of war was alleged to be on the former occasion: perhaps he regretted the failure of a second opportunity of retorting on England, in this way, the hatred and insult with which he had ever been treated by its government. At any rate, the distrust of the English travellers was founded on experience, and the reproach conveyed in this manifestation of it was answered by an ingenious, spirited, and in some sort conciliatory pleasantry. After the battle of Waterloo, the travellers, some of whom had retired no further than to the Low Countries, followed in the train of the victorious, and invading armies: all were impatient to return to Paris; in truth their impatience was not without good cause. All the monuments of the fine arts were now to be dispersed: the _fruits of victory_ deposited at Paris were soon to be restored to their former owners.