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Excerpt from The Coming Empire: Or Two Thousand Miles in Texas on Horseback
NE of the most entertaining works to me, is an account by Montaigne of a horse-back trip over portions of France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, in the year 1580, by himself and three or four of his select friends. It is a work in which the liveliness of the old Gascon continually sparkles though some may think that he talks too much of the stone in the bladder with which he was then afflicted. I have often thought that if I should visit Europe, I would have a great deal of pleasure in pursuing the route marked in his journal comparing the people and the country along the way with what they were as he saw and described them three centuries ago. It would be, I judge, a most entertaining employment to any one of observing turn of mind holding continually before him two pictures of the same thing the one, delineated by a master hand, of what it was three hundred years ago, and the other the Present, with its changed or unchanged conditions.
There the dead centuries move in living forms before him, and he may, as he chooses, pluck a rose from the Present, or put forth his hand and gather a fresh lily from the Past.
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