We have only to go back half a century to the time when a tour upon the Continent of Europe was attended by great expense, inconvenience, and even danger. It consumed much time, and no Englishman upon whom business did not lay a necessity to travel, could undertake any very extensive pilgrimage in these foreign countries unless possessed of ample means united to ample leisure. It was thus generally reserved for young noblemen and gentlemen of wealth, as the completion of their education, to take, with a tutor, a courier, and a sufficient retinue, the grand tour of Europe, the limit of which was usually, though not always, Constantinople. I suppose this circumstance has given rise to the Continental idea, which at least formerly prevailed, that every Englishman was a _milord Anglais_, and to its practical consequence, from which present travellers continue to suffer—the custom, gradually disappearing, of charging English persons upon a different scale from that applied to natives. No doubt many of those men of former days scattered money profusely, and to a certain extent their successors continue to do so, and are even exceeded by some of the American travellers who, accustomed to pay in dollars where shillings with us often suffice, contrive by their extravagance to spoil for others the places they frequent. Times are now changed since the days of our grandfathers. The treacherous sailing vessel (the smack, which would take at one time three days, and at another, because of adverse winds, three weeks to go from Leith to London) is supplanted by the steady, expeditious, and almost faultlessly punctual steamboat; while the lumbering diligence or almost equally lumbering post–chaise has been driven out of the field by, wherever it exists, the rapid railway train. Nevertheless, as regards Continental railway rapidity, M. Arago’s expectations that Parisians might ‘on the same day examine the preparations of our squadron at Toulon; may breakfast on juicy rougets at Marseilles; may bathe at mid–day their relaxed limbs in the mineral waters of Bagnères, and return in the evening by way of Bordeaux to attend a ball or the Opera House,’[1] have hardly as yet, at least, been realized; for the railway train abroad bears about the same proportion in point of speed to the English train as the clumsy diligence did of old to our high–flyers and our ten–mile–an–hour stage–coaches.[2] Sometimes, indeed, people in former times, who were able to do so, travelled on the Continent in pursuit of health; and a very interesting account of a tour of this description, made to a large extent over the same ground as that which forms the subject of description in the following pages, is contained in _The Diary of an Invalid_, by Henry Matthew, A.M., made during a journey, performed in the years 1817–18–19, through Italy, Switzerland, and France, from which an idea of the difference of travelling in those days—sixty years ago—from what it is now, may