His letters during the tour were such as, previously to the age of railroads, brothers who had not been abroad before used to write for the edification of sisters who expected never to go abroad at all.

He describes in minute detail manners and institutions that to us are no longer novelties, and monuments which an educated Englishman of our time knows as well as Westminster Abbey, and a great deal better than the Tower.

Everything that he saw, heard, ate, drank, paid, and suffered, was noted down in his exuberant diction to be read aloud and commented on over the breakfast table in Great Ormond Street.
"At Rouen," he says, "I was struck by the union of venerable antiquity with extreme liveliness and gaiety.

We have nothing of the sort in England.

Till the time of James the First, I imagine, our houses were almost all of wood, and have in consequence disappeared.