[The English in Italy]

When peace came, after many long years of war, when our island prison was opened to us, and our watery exit from it was declared practicable, it was the paramount wish of every English heart, ever addicted to vagabondizing, to hasten to the continent, and to imitate our forefathers in their almost forgotten custom, of spending the greater part of their lives and fortunes in their carriages on the post-roads of the continent.^b With the brief and luckless exception of the peace of Amiens, the continent had not been open for the space of more than one-and-twenty years;^c a new generation had sprung up, and the whole of this, who had money and time at command, poured, in one vast / stream, across the Pas de Calais into France: in their numbers, and their eagerness to proceed forward, they might be compared to the Norwegian rats, who always go right on, and when they come to an opposing stream, still pursue their route, till a bridge is formed of the bodies of the drowned, over which the living pass in safety. The simile holds good in more ways than one: the first emigrants, it is true, were not wholly killed, but the miseries they endured, of dirty packets and wretched inns, were the substratum from which has arisen the elegant steam-packet, and the improved state of the continental hotels. But in those early days of migration, in the summer of 1814, every inconvenience was hailed as a new chapter in the romance of our travels;^d the worst annoyance of all, the Custom-house, was amusing as a novelty; we saw 148with extasy the strange costume of the French women, read with delight our own descriptions in the passport, looked with curiosity on every plât,^a fancying that the fried-leaves of artichokes were frogs; we saw shepherds in opera-hats, and post-boys in jack-boots; and (pour comble de merveille)^b heard little boys and girls talk French: it was acting a novel, being an incarnate romance. But these days are now vanished: frequent landings at Calais have deprived it of its captivating novelty. Many of our children, under the guidance of foreign nursery-maids, lisp French as well as any little wood-shod urchin among the natives. We have learned to curse the douane,^c and denounce passports as tyrannical and insufferable impediments to our free progress.