So I pitched on a tour in Brittany as the subject of my first attempt.
Those were happy days, when all the habitable globe had not been run over by thousands of tourists, hundreds of whom are desirous of describing their doings in print--not but that the notion, whether a publisher's or writer's notion, that new ground is needed for the production of a good and amusing book of travels, is other than a great mistake.

I forget what proposing author it was, who in answer to a publisher urging the fact that "a dozen writers have told us all about so and so," replied, "But _I_ have not told you what _I_ have seen and thought about it." But if I had been the publisher I should at once have asked to see his MS.

The days when a capital book may be written on a _voyage autour de ma chambre_ are as present as ever they were.

And "A Summer Afternoon's Walk to Highgate" might be the subject of a delightful book if only the writer were the right man.
Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist.

All this is now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a dead level of uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character, manners, and peculiarities.