I cannot help regretting, however, that our traveller should have omitted to trace his route through Egypt, not only because his having done so would have been advantageous to me, but from a persuasion that the omission has been seriously injurious to his popularity. It is, moreover, a very great error, and one in which I myself formerly participated, to imagine that a traveller is more likely to impart just notions of the scene of his researches by giving the results only of his experience, suppressing the manner in which that experience was obtained. An attentive examination of the works of travellers of all ages and countries has at length created a contrary conviction in my mind. In a judicious personal narrative the traveller is but one interlocutor in a drama exhibiting innumerable characters and a perpetually changing scene. You in some sort behold him surrounded by strangers in a strange land; you observe them not, and hear them, as it were, converse together; and if the traveller himself sometimes feigns or walks in masquerade, it is rarely that the natives can be supposed to have sufficiently powerful motives for so doing. They exhibit themselves exactly as they are. It would seem to follow from this view of the case, that whatever its advantages in other respects may be, the method adopted by Volney is liable, on the grounds above stated, to very serious objections. It not only shuts out the traveller from our view, but, in lieu of an animated picture, presents us with reasoning and discussion, able, I admit, and frequently original, but wanting that irresistible charm which is possessed in so eminent a degree by beautiful narrative.