"We represent him to ourselves as of dignified and prepossessing exterior. He knows how instantly to place himself on an equality with high and low, and to be welcome to all. That he excites the attention of women is natural enough,--he attracts and is attracted; but his experience of the world enables him to terminate any little _affaires du coeur_ without violence or indecorum. "The journey was undertaken very recently, and brings us the latest intelligence from the countries which he viewed with an acute, clear, and comprehensive eye. "He gradually affords us a clue to his own character. We see before us a finely constituted being, endowed with great capacity; born to great external advantages and felicities; but in whom a lively spirit of enterprise is not united to constancy and perseverance; whence he experiences frequent failure and disappointment. But this very defect gives him that peculiar genial aimlessness, which to the reader is the charm of his travels. * * * "His descriptions are equally good in the various regions for which talents of such different kinds are required. The wildest and the loveliest scenes of nature; buildings, and works of art; incidents of every kind; individual character and social groups,--all are treated with the same clear perception, the same easy unaffected grace. * * * "The peculiarities of English manners and habits are drawn vividly and distinctly, and without exaggeration. We acquire a lively idea of that wonderful combination, that luxuriant growth,--of that insular life which is based in boundless wealth and civil freedom, in universal monotony and manifold diversity; formal and capricious, active and torpid, energetic and dull, comfortable and tedious, the envy and the derision of the world. "Like other unprejudiced travellers of modern times, our author is not very much enchanted with the English form of existence: his cordial and sincere admiration are often accompanied by unsparing censure. * * * "He is by no means inclined to favour the faults and weaknesses of the English; and in these cases he has the greatest and best among them--those whose reputation is universal--on his side."--GÖTHE. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE THIRD AND FOURTH VOLS. OF THE LONDON EDITION.