The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 397: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

310 THE STEAM PACKET, expiration of six months only six copies had been sold; and that so far from the work being at all the circulating libraries, as pompously announced (publishers always put this statement forward, even before the book has left the binder’s hands,) it had not given itself the trou- ble to quit the shelves of the publishers to whose care its sale had been entrusted. Mr. Buckram, however, had the credit of being an author —the actual writer of a substantive work ; and, in consequence thereof, he enjoyed an immense augmentation of influence (though, perhaps, a decrease of credit) at the public-house at the corner. We do not hear that he has since committed to paper his ideas upon any particular subject, although, by the aid of a volume or two of travels, he might have written * Travels in China” quite as easily as he had composed his ‘‘ Travels in Europe.” : | But in case our readers should imagine that we have indulged in a little exaggeration, with respect to the literary episode in Mr. Buck- ram’s biography, we must remind him that this is by no meansa solitary example of so marvellous an achievement as the composition of a book of travels in lands which the author has never seen. It is a common practice now-a-days: half the ‘‘ diaries” and ‘‘ journals ” of travel which issue from the press are comfortably scribbled in little back-parlours in Kentish Town, Camberwell, and “Brompton ;—and while the writer was supposed, at some particular date, to have been standing upon a peak of the Himaleh mountains, or to be suffering all the horrors of anight in Lapland, he was, in reality, helping some jovial friends to empty a punchbowl in some quiet tavern within a couple of hours’. walk of the General Post-office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand. Sometimes writers of travels have really been for a few hours or days —seldom weeks— in the territory which forms the subject of their nar- rative ;—and on their return to England, they, of course, deem themselves fully qualified to discuss the whole policy, social and mo- ral condition, manners and peculiarities, arts and commerce, power and jurisprudence of the people with whose language they are, probably, altogether ignorant, and whom they seldom saw otherwise than through the panes of glass of their travelling-carriage windows. Mr. Buck- ram, therefore, only trod im the same path which so many other emi- nent authors have pursued—with this difference, that somehow or another thet books sold and hes didn’t. Eomicbooks. co