doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other
hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type,
bear unmistakable stains of the soil on every page. You not only feel
the vital personality of the traveler, but you would distinguish his
doublet and hose among a thousand. He does not soar, with an airy grace,
from one hill-top to another, picking out for you a choice scene here
and there, as he skims the land--he plods along the road, laboriously
and with muddy shoes, and sees the common much oftener than the sublime.

In all that concerns man, indeed, a much plainer speech was permitted to
the old traveler. There were no squeamish readers in those days, and
hence, in some respects, he is too candid for modern taste. But it often
happens that precisely the characteristics or customs of strange races
which are of most value to the anthropologist, belong to those cryptic
mysteries of human nature, to which, in our refined age, one is
prohibited from referring. At least, the absence of constraint--the
possibility of entire frankness, even though the writer should have no
occasion to avail himself of the privilege--imparts a rare loveliness
and raciness to the narrative. On the other hand, in modern works which
I have tested by my own personal knowledge of the subject, I have been
quite as much struck with the amount of suppressed as with that of
expressed truth. Mansfield Parkyns and Captain Burton, I have no doubt,
will bear me out in this statement. Why has no African explorer, for
instance, yet ventured to announce the fact,--at once interesting and
important,--that if a traveler in the central regions of that continent
could be accompanied by his wife, the chances of his success would be
greatly improved? In the apparent celibacy of explorers, barbarous races
perceive simply an absence or perversion of the masculine instinct,
which at once excites their distrust.