Travellers are too much in the practice of describing under the influence of their early and home-bred impressions. As a man sees the world, his prejudices diminish, his diffidence of his own decisions increases, and with both, his indisposition to write. Many a man has commenced travelling with a firm intention of faithfully describing all he saw, and of commenting, as he conceived, impartially, but who has gradually suffered this intention to escape him, until he gets to be too critical in his distinctions to satisfy even himself. Thus, the English cockney, who has never seen a house with more than two drawing-rooms, fancies it extraordinary that an Italian with a palace larger than St. James’s, should not always occupy its state apartments, although his own king is guilty of the same act of neglect. Instead of saying that the Princes Doria, Chigi, Borghese, Colonna, Corsini, &c., have vast palaces like George IV., and that their state apartments are liberally thrown open to the public, while, like King George and all other kings, they occupy, in every-day life, rooms of less pretension and of more comfort, they say, that these Roman nobles have huge palaces,—a fact that cannot be denied,—while they live in corners of them. This false account of the real state of the case arises simply from the circumstance that an English nobleman occupies _his_ best rooms. The question whether the second-rate rooms of an Italian palace are not equal to the best apartments of an ordinary English dwelling, never suggests itself.