Lauder wrote a diary: the Duc de Rohan a "letter" to his mother, summarising the valuable information acquired in a virtuous perambulation through Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Germany, the Low Countries, England, including a flying visit to Scotland; an harangue of flat mediocrity, imitative in character, thoughtful only in so far as, and in the way, he had been taught to be thoughtful. But, read between the lines, it is most interesting; better representing the Average Tourist in his nominal every-day state of mind than any other book. He embodies the sayings and doings of hundreds of others whose only memorials are on tombstones or in genealogies; he endures the inns in silence; never ate nor drank nor saw a coin or a poor man, for aught he says; passed the country in haste, ignoring the scenery except where "classical" authors had praised it, considered the Alps a nuisance, and democratic governments a degraded, albeit successful, eccentricity; and hastened past the Lago di Garda, in spite of the new fortress in building there, to Brescia, the latter being "better worth seeing." It was just 1600 when he travelled, and the ideas of the year are reflected in his opening lines with an exactitude possible only to one who has the mind of his contemporaries and none of his own. "Peace having been made, I saw I could not be any use in France." So he employed his idleness in attempting to learn something, in noting the differences in countries and peoples. Yet he would not be the Average Tourist made perfect that he is if there was not some idea of the future hovering in him—he is the only traveller, except Sir Henry Blount, the philosopher, who notes, or even seems to note, that the chief factor of differences between human being and human being is geography.