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 promised us, if not a convenient, at least an agreeable, accommodation for the night. We had made it a rule to decline as much as possible from the high road, bending our course generally towards a village on the top of a rising eminence, or secluded from the rest of the world in a deep valley. There nature was purer, happiness more artless; the inhabitants were handsomer and more cordial; and the reception was kinder than in the neighbourhood of more cultivated manners.

And why did we travel? Was a statistic speculation, or the examination of the different degrees of morality, or of churches and steeples, or of bridges and edifices; were the fine arts, or any thing of that kind, the objects of our peregrination? Certainly not. If one is desirous to travel for that purpose, one must not stop long at Paris, where speculation finds such an ample scope, and where the finest products of art, and the objects of the most luxuriant physical and moral refinement are so numerous, that a resi-