My journey through central France took me by Chartres, Orleans, down the Loire to Nantes, then through La Vendée to Fontenay, Niort, Poitiers, Saintes, Rochefort, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Angouleme, Limoges, and thence back to Paris. On looking at the book for the first time since I read the proof-sheets I find it amusing. The fault of it, as an account of the district traversed, is, that it treats of the localities described on a scale that would have needed twenty volumes, instead of two, to complete the story of my tour in the same proportion. I do not remember that any of my critics noted this fault. Perhaps they feared that on the first suggestion of such an idea I should have set about mending the difficulty by the production of a score of other volumes on the subject! I could easily have done so. I was in no danger of incurring the anathema launched by Sterne--I think it was Sterne--against the man who went from Dan to Beersheba and found all barren. I found matter of interest everywhere, and could have gone on doing so, as it seemed to me in those days, for ever. The part of France I visited is not much betravelled by Englishmen, and the general idea is that it is not an interesting section of the country. I thought, and still think, otherwise. My notion is, that if a line were drawn through France from Calais to the centre of the Pyrenean chain, by far the greater part of the prettiest country and most interesting populations, as well as places, would be found to the westward of it. I do not think that my bill of fare excited any great interest in the reading world. But I suppose that I contrived to interest a portion of it; for the book was fairly successful. I wrote a book in many respects of the same kind many years subsequently, giving an account of a journey through certain little-visited districts of central Italy, under the title of a _Lenten Journey_. It is not, I think, so good a book as my French journeys furnished, mainly to my mind because it was in one small volume instead of two big ones, and both for want of space and want of time was done hurriedly and too compendiously. The true motto for the writer of such a book is _nihil a me alienum puto_, whether _humanum_ or otherwise. My own opinion is, to make a perfectly clean breast of it, that I could now write a fairly amusing book on a journey from Tyburn turnpike to Stoke Pogis. But then such books should be addressed to readers who are not in such a tearing hurry as the unhappy world is in these latter days.