There was a Poet who wrote a descriptive poem, and then took a journey to see the scenes which he had described. Better late than never, he thought; and thought wisely in so thinking. Drayton was not likely to have acted thus upon after consideration, if in the first conception of his subject he did not feel sufficient ardour for such an undertaking. It would have required indeed a spirit of enterprize as unusual in those days as it is ordinary now. Many a long day's ride must he have taken over rough roads, and in wild countries; and many a weary step would it have cost him, and many a poor lodging must he have put up with at night, where he would have found poor fare, if not cold comfort. So he thought it enough, in many if not most parts, to travel by the map, and believed himself to have been sufficiently “punctual and exact in giving unto every province its peculiar bounds, in laying out their several land-marks, tracing the course of most of the principal rivers, and setting forth the situation and estate of the chiefest towns.” Peter Heylyn who speaks thus of his own exactness in a work partaking enough of the same nature as the Poly-olbion to be remembered here, though it be in prose and upon a wider subject, tells a humourous anecdote of himself, in the preface to his Cosmography. “He that shall think this work imperfect,” says he, “(though I confess it to be nothing but imperfections) for some deficiencies of this kind, may be likened to the country fellow, (in Aristophanes, if my memory fail not,) who picked a great quarrel with the map because he could not find where his own farm stood. And such a country customer I did meet with once, a servant of my elder brother, sent by him with some horses to Oxford, to bring me and a friend of mine unto his house; who having lost his way as we passed through the forest of Whichwood, and not being able to recover any beaten track, did very earnestly entreat me to lead the way, till I had brought him past the woods to the open fields. Which when I had refused to do, as I had good reason, alledging that I had never been there before, and therefore that I could not tell which way to lead him; ‘that's strange!’ said he; ‘I have heard my old master, your Father, say that you made a book of all the world; and cannot you find your way out of the wood?’” Peter Heylyn was one who fell on evil times, and on whom, in consequence, evil tongues have fallen. But he was an able, honest, brave man who “stood to his tackling when he was tasted.” And if thou hast not read his Survey of the State of France, Reader, thou hast not read one of our liveliest books of travels in its lighter parts; and one of the wisest and most replete with information that ever was written by a young man.