ports. From the Esterelles to San Remo this has all been ruined
by the horde of northern barbarians who have made a sort of
Trouville, Brighton, or Biarritz, with American hotels and
Parisian boulevards on every headland and bay. First came the
half underground railway, a long tunnel with lucid intervals,
which destroyed the road by blocking up its finest views and
making it practically useless. Then miles of unsightly
caravanserais high walls, pompous villas, and Parisian grandes
rues crushed out every trace of Italy, of history, and pictorial
charm." So writes Mr. Frederic Harrison of this delectable coast,
[In the Daily Chronicle, 15th March 1898.] as it was, at a period
within his own recollection--a period at which it is hardly
fanciful to suppose men living who might just have remembered
Smollett, as he was in his last days, when he returned to die on
the Riviera di Levante in the autumn of 1771. Travel had then
still some of the elements of romance. Rapidity has changed all
that. The trouble is that although we can transport our bodies so
much more rapidly than Smollett could, our understanding travels
at the same old pace as before. And in the meantime railway and
tourist agencies have made of modern travel a kind of mental
postcard album, with grand hotels on one side, hotel menus on the
other, and a faint aroma of continental trains haunting, between
the leaves as it were. Our real knowledge is still limited to the
country we have walked over, and we must not approach the country
we would appreciate faster than a man may drive a horse or propel
a bicycle; or we shall lose the all-important sense of artistic
approach. Even to cross the channel by time-table is fatal to
that romantic spirit (indispensable to the true magic of travel)
which a slow adjustment of the mind to a new social atmosphere
and a new historical environment alone can induce. Ruskin, the