I MURRAY AND BAEDEKER 27 another German guide-book an excellent device. He arranged his Swiss volume so that it could be unbound and divided into separately sewn sections, each covering a different piece of the ground. Many walkers have blessed Baedeker for this aid to portability. Murray followed Baedeker's lead in some respects (though not in this), but followed too late, and in catering for the hurried tourist who wants full details about inns and the like had in some cases to curtail the special features of his earlier editions. These remain the best, and one at least of them-Richard Ford's Handbook to Spain -is almost a classic. Fortunately for collectors of such things, there is no run after early Murrays (except in the case of the original edition of Ford). Just not too late for use in a piece of work I was engaged upon at the time, I picked up for a few pence a Third Edition of Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1847). On looking into it I found a series of notes contributed by Ruskin, which had been crowded out of the modern editions and had escaped the notice of previous bibliographers of my author.' Murray's foreign Handbooks are now, I suppose, books of the past, for it has been announced that the copyright of them has been acquired by Mr. Muirhead for the series of new guides, published by Messrs. Macmillan, which are to "incorporate the good 1 The Notes were collected and reprinted in vol. xxxviii. of the Library Edition of Ruskin. points of Murray," while beating Baedeker on his own ground. Let us hope that these Blue Guides will indeed combine the best points of the rival Reds. The series has made a promising start with an excellent Handbook to London. It is curious that the claims of portability were so long neglected by the publishers of Augustus Hare's series of "Walks"-books as often enjoyed by travellers as derided by critics. The very title ought to have suggested that the books should be pocketable, but it is only of recent years, and then only in the case of some of them, that they have become so. The worst offender in matter of heaviness is Signor Lanciani. His books about Ancient and Christian Rome are eminently readable and companionable, but the heavy paper and (as I think) superfluous photographic illustrations make them impossible as actual companions on rambles in Rome. For guide to the Remains of Ancient Rome, Professor Middleton's book is easily the best, but it is no longer up to the date of recent excavations. When I was last in Rome 1 If any reader cares to follow this battle of the books into further detail, he will find copious, and not unentertaining, material in the following places (1) Pall Mall Gazette, August 23, 1889, an interview with Karl Baedeker; (2) Murray's Magazine, Nov. 1889, an article by John Murray on "The Origin and History of Murray's Handbooks for Travellers"; (3) the exhaustive book by Mr. W. A. B. Coolidge on Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-Books, also published in 1889. My remarks about Murray above are meant to apply only to the foreign Handbooks. Those to the English counties have retained their old excellence. Exception must also be made in the case of Murray's Switzerland, the latest editions of which were the best, being re-edited by Mr. Coolidge. THE BISHOPS' BOOK 29 I found a little book by Mrs. Burton-Brown to be an instructive companion. In these rambling remarks on companions for foreign travel I have left to the last the book which of all is the most indispensable. Bishop Stubbs made a teasing reference to it in a speech to some city magnates at a meeting of a High School. There was one book, he said, which he had ever at hand, night and day, the one book that a bishop must always have by him. "You know it well," he added; "it begins with B. It is Bradshaw." The Continental Bradshaw or some substitute for it is not only indispensable for actual travel, but is a fond companion alike in retrospect and in anticipation. How often . . . in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart. The tours that one makes in his own room with a Bradshaw and a Murray at hand are sometimes the best of all, for in them the railway carriages are never crowded, the trains are never late, the inns are always glad to see you, the beds are always clean, and it never rains except at night. Present and future travellers in classic lands may enjoy an easy companionship denied to their predecessors. Pocket editions of the classics there were of old time-even waistcoat-pocket classics for those strong eyes that could do with Pickering's Diamond Classics; but scholarship grows rusty and dictionaries are heavy. The "Loeb Classical Library," of convenient format, and with the Greek or Latin text on the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, precisely meets the need of the unlearned traveller. Who will now ever go to Rome without a volume or two of the Loeb Latin Library? or to the isles of Greece without his Loeb Odyssey? Or to Sicily either, I ought perhaps to add in these days when Samuel Butler has so wide a vogue.' 1 Nor is it only the traveller in classic lands who will bless the Loeb Library. The call of the classics is strong upon those who make long voyages or live much in solitude. Undistracted by the carking care of trivial tasks, or seeking consolation in danger, or thrown back in solitude upon the riddle of existence, men turn to the ancient writings in which, as Professor Murray has finely said, "stridency and clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness," and "the great things of the human spirit still shine like stars, pointing Man's 1 I recall an afternoon when Butler, lately back from Sicily, had come to take tea with my wife in our house in Russell Square. A friend chanced to come in who knew not of "The Sicilian Origin of the Odyssey." Butler was describing the gracious hospitality he had received during his visit, and. our friend said, "You are a very popular person, then, with the Sicilians?" Butler, who in his characteristic way was sitting upright on the edge of his chair, looked gravely over his spectacles and replied, "Yes, for have I not given them the Odyssey?' THE LOEB LIBRARY 31 way onward to the great triumph or the great tragedy, and even the little things, the beloved and tender and funny and familiar things, beckon across gulfs of death and change with a magic poignancy.' 1 There's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, someone's death, And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears It is not only men of letters who feel thus impelled to stretch hands across the gulf. Cecil Rhodes, for want of a Loeb Library, projected something of the sort for his own reading beneath Table Mountain. Stanley, on his expeditions to Equatorial Africa, took Homer and Herodotus and Horace. Mr. Roosevelt, on his sporting expedition to Africa, included Homer and Euripides in his Pigskin Library. We will turn to another man of letters to explain the call of the classics which men of a different type have none the less felt. "On long voyages," says Froude, “I take Greeks as my best companions. . . The days 2 pass, and our ship flies fast upon her way : γλαυκὸν ὑπὲρ οἶδμα κυανόχροά τε κυμάτων 1 Religio Grammatici, p. 47. 2 So called from the binding of the books chosen as companions of the chase. There was a list of the books in one of the daily papers, I think the Pall Mall Gazette, of Sept. 23, 1909. |