I SHOULD call this a very satisfactory book about a country-I mean that, at the end of reading it, the reader will have been presented with a certain number of views, and that those views square roughly with my own or those of any other man of good-will. And any book about a country upon any other lines cannot well be a satisfactory performance. Any man may say," I know my Germany," as any other may say that he knows his London, and he may, indeed, have a knowledge of a country or of a city that is based upon long residence in the one or the other and that is fortified by many statistics. Yet countries, cities, and the hearts of men, are regions so wide, or, as it were, streams so profound, that it would appear that there is no man fitted to write a book of a factual kind about any city, any country, or, for the matter of that, about any single human being. For, as far as facts go, we have nothing but them to go upon; and facts are selected for us either by blind Destiny that will have forced us into certain paths, or by our own inborn predilections that set us wandering about a country, directed to certain regions by who knows what?-by the recommendavii