pleased himself in London; or you may read in Mr Round's "Commune of London" how great a part in the twelfth century foreign merchants, cut off from their own lands, played in exacting from the Angevin kings the liberty of London herself.)
It was the same with those whom London sent out. The few—the gentlemen and the merchant-adventurers—went, say, to the Spice Islands. The hardships of a long voyage, the great mysteries of seas and skies, chastened what of their souls was insular. They went among strange peoples with minds ready to be delighted. They sought, perhaps, nothing more romantic than pepper, but for their lives' sakes they respected local traditions, and were ready to kneel with their faces to the ground when a Soldan went past. They had left their homes so far behind them.
And this, indeed, is the "defect of the quality" of rapid travel. The Londoner abroad is no longer sought after, fêted, a messenger of the goodness of his race, as were Congreve, Chesterfield, Gibbon, and, in another way, Richardson. Nowadays in the flood of him he has become the tweed-suited, long-toothed being of caricatures. The defect of the quality, because the traveller now, like the gipsy, takes his home and his home-spirit so much with him. And the one and the other are apt to find that every man's hand is against him.
Yet if that be the defect, the product of the quality of rapid transit is London itself. France has its Ministry of Roads and Bridges, and that is probably why Paris
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