a bundle of human passions--there are not many of them, half a dozen at
the most; season with a mixture of good and evil; flavour the whole with
the sauce of death, and serve up where and when you will. "The Saint's
Cell," "The Haunted Keep," "The Dungeon Grave," "The Lover's Leap"--call
it what you will, the stew's the same.

Lastly, in this book there will be no scenery. This is not laziness on
my part; it is self-control. Nothing is easier to write than scenery;
nothing more difficult and unnecessary to read. When Gibbon had to trust
to travellers' tales for a description of the Hellespont, and the Rhine
was chiefly familiar to English students through the medium of _Caesar's
Commentaries_, it behoved every globe-trotter, for whatever distance, to
describe to the best of his ability the things that he had seen. Dr.
Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could
read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and with profit.
To a cockney who had never seen higher ground than the Hog's Back in
Surrey, an account of Snowdon must have appeared exciting. But we, or
rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. The
man who plays tennis every year at the foot of the Matterhorn, and
billiards on the summit of the Rigi, does not thank you for an elaborate
and painstaking description of the Grampian Hills. To the average man,
who has seen a dozen oil paintings, a hundred photographs, a thousand
pictures in the illustrated journals, and a couple of panoramas of
Niagara, the word-painting of a waterfall is tedious.

An American friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well
enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and
more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of
photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth put together. I also remember his saying concerning this