a kind, that they challenge no other right of being remembered
than as they had the honor of having happened to the author, to
whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens to himself.

Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this
kind, that he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity
should he omit the minutest thing in the detail of his journal.
That the fact is true is sufficient to give it a place there,
without any consideration whether it is capable of pleasing or
surprising, of diverting or informing, the reader. I have seen a
play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Behn's or of Mrs.
Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely
ridiculed. An ignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know
not what reason, the conduct of a young nobleman in his travels
is committed, and who is sent abroad to show my lord the world,
of which he knows nothing himself, before his departure from a
town, calls for his Journal to record the goodness of the wine
and tobacco, with other articles of the same importance, which
are to furnish the materials of a voyage at his return home. The
humor, it is true, is here carried very far; and yet, perhaps,
very little beyond what is to be found in writers who profess no
intention of dealing in humor at all. Of one or other, or both
of these kinds, are, I conceive, all that vast pile of books
which pass under the names of voyages, travels, adventures,
lives, memoirs, histories, etc., some of which a single traveler
sends into the world in many volumes, and others are, by
judicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in folio, and
inscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their own
travels: thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others.