Another weakness is the idea of being able to rate enjoyments or estimate hardships. It is not merely that the hardships and enjoyments are not equal in degree when similar in character, but very often they are reversed. A German coming to England will complain of the misery of hard beds. The English, but twenty years ago, would have made the same complaint: their habit is changed, their enjoyments are changed with them, or their fancied enjoyments are changed. The climax in the picture which a writer draws of the sufferings of the Spanish nuns, is their having to go about bare-foot. Tell this in Scotland. To myself there cannot be a greater source of annoyance and vexation--there is nothing in which I have a greater sense of astonishment and surprise--than at nations wearing shoes and boots. The whole economy of the feet in Europe is something as disgusting as it is marvellous. We see the poorer orders clogging themselves with heavy shoes out of doors,[106] and the wealthier classes confining their feet and soiling their apartments in doors. Those who have lived in Scotland will understand the first, those who have lived in the East will apprehend the second. In regard to cookery, costume, and forms of society, we have habits formed; and, surely, he is an unreasoning being who proceeds by means of those habits to estimate the habits of other nations: the consequence of attempting to do so is a vague uncertainty of spirit, which concentrates itself in his eye wherein he looks. The useful traveller and the profitable observer will commence by a process the very opposite. He will set aside all attempts at comparison; he will eschew every thought and judgment; he will know he has to begin by lifting himself out of his own habits and modes of thought, in order to place himself in those of the country which he visits. He will do so by endeavouring to feel like them, which he never can do, if he presume for a moment to reason about them. Imlac’s description of a poet had not proceeded to its close when the captive Prince of Abyssinia told him he had already said enough to convince him that no man on earth could be a poet; but Imlac’s catalogue of the qualifications of a poet extended no further than to acquirements and talents. The qualifications of a traveller are far more extensive; for while it is necessary for him to possess all the materials of which a poet ought to be possessor, while he ought to be gifted with the imaginative qualities in which lives the poet’s very essence, he should also have the scrutinizing eye of a philosopher, the analytical spirit of a metaphysician, and all these put together can only be of use when lifting him out of his times:--they restore to him the use of his own eyes and ears. FOOTNOTES: [103] A lady at a masquerade dressed in maga, and astonishing some Spaniards with her avonica and mialilto, curtseyed; they immediately detected the false sister. [104] Su Seguro Servidor que su Mano besa.