Bayard Taylor's Travels in Greece and Russia [pp. 648-656]

BAYARD TAYLOR9S TRAVELS
ART. III.-BAYARD TAYLOR'S TRAVELS IN GREECE AND PTRUSSIA,
MR. TAYLOR is a sprightly, volatile, and correct writer, and a
fashionable, common place, and hasty, if not superficial observer and thinker. Hie is a sort of miniature Macaulay, and
because he is above want himself, and finds modern improveinents conducing to his comfort and enjoyment, never doubts
for a moment but that those improvements equally conduce to
the well-being of all. Good railroads, good steamboats,
good hotels, and abundance of trade and travel, must, he seems
to think, occasion universal prosperity. He would not, proba,
bly, credit the anecdote of the two Yankees who made five dollars each by swapping jackets, but neither he nor Adam
Smith, nor Macaulay, nor any political economist, we
presume, would doubt that if the " swapping" be conducted
on the grand scale, and the world does nothing else but travel
about, bargain, trade, make profits, and keep up a continuous
war of the wits, that, ill time, everybody will get rich. The
vulgar theory that labor creates wealth and trade (in general),
but transfers it, finds no place in Mr. Taylor's fashionable philosophy. Such a writer is exceedingly agreeable to the multitude, because he holds out the prospect of universal wellbeing, attainable on easy terms. That he should despise
Greece, which has neither railroads n6r good hotels, and hold
the memory of Leonidas and his Spartans (who knew nothing
of trade) in contempt, is quite natural.'Tis a popular way of
thinking, too, because " money is the, only nobility" in the
modern world, as "valor " was in the ancient.
Mr. Taylor is the embodiment and impersonation of what is
called " a sensible man"-he is never truthful, but always in
the fashion. The prevailing mnode, whether in morals, religion,
politics, or dress, is his measure of right, the god of his idolatry. He writes for the reading masses, not from calculation,
but because among the masses he lives, and breathes, and has
his being. It never occurs to such well-fed gentlemen as he
and Mr. Macaulay, that beneath the reading masses-the
multitudinous parventus-there is a mass of humanity ten
times more numerous, who neither know how to read, nor are
left time, leisure, or opportunity to read. For this " struggling, heaving mass of humanity," by coining whose groans
and sighs such fashionable butterflies as Macaulay, Dickens,
Sue, Dumas, Thackeray, &c., are enabled to " strut their hour
upon the stage," Mr. Taylor has no sympathies. He hates the
noble, he hates the brave, he hates the religious, he hates the
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