Some people travel to enlarge their minds, or to
write a book; and the worst of travelling for such reasons is that
it so often implants in the traveller, when he returns, a desperate
desire to enlarge other people's minds too. Unhappily, it needs an
extraordinary gift of vivid description and a tactful art of
selection to make the reflections of one's travels interesting to
other people. It is a great misfortune for biographers that there
are abundance of people who are stirred, partly by unwonted leisure
and partly by awakened interest, to keep a diary only when they are
abroad. These extracts from diaries of foreign travel, which
generally pour their muddy stream into a biography on the threshold
of the hero's manhood, are things to be resolutely skipped. What
one desires in a biography is to see the ordinary texture of a
man's life, an account of his working days, his normal hours; and
to most people the normal current of their lives appears so
commonplace and uninteresting that they keep no record of it; while
they often keep an elaborate record of their impressions of foreign
travel, which are generally superficial and picturesque, and
remarkably like the impressions of all other intelligent people.
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