Of all the popular delusions that we labour under in England, I scarcely know of one more widely circulated, and less founded in fact, than the advantages of foreign travel. Far be it from me to undervalue the benefits men of education receive by intercourse with strangers, and the opportunities of correcting by personal observation the impressions already received by study. No one sets a higher price on this than I do; no one estimates more fully the advantages of tempering one's nationality by the candid comparison of our own institutions with those of other countries; no one values more highly the unbiassed frame of mind produced by extending the field of our observation, and, instead of limiting our experience by the details of a book, reading from the wide-spread page of human nature itself. So conscious, indeed, am I of the importance of this, that I look upon his education as but very partial indeed who has not travelled. It is not, therefore, against the benefits of seeing the world I would inveigh--it is rather against the general application of the practice to the whole class of our countrymen and countrywomen who swarm on the continent. Unsuited by their tastes--unprepared by previous information-deeming a passport and a letter of credit all-sufficient for their purpose--they set out upon their travels. From their ignorance of a foreign language, their journey is one of difficulty and embarrassment at every step. They understand little of what they see, nothing of what they hear. The discomforts of foreign life have no palliation, by their being enabled to reason on, and draw inferences from them. All the sources of information are hermetically sealed against them, and their tour has nothing to compensate for its fatigue, and expense, save the absurd detail of adventure to which their ignorance has exposed them. It is not my intention to rail in this place against the injury done to the moral feeling of our nation, by intimate association with the habits of the Continent. Reserving this for a more fitting time, I shall merely remark at present, that, so far as the habits of virtue are concerned, more mischief is done among the middle class of our countrymen, than those of a more exalted sphere.