Caviare to the general, perhaps, A Journal of My Journey
to Paris in the year 1765, by the Rev. William Cole (Constable, 16s.) is none the less attractive for those who like our sober Georgian ancestors. Cole was an old friend of Horace Walpole and shared his interest in current scandal and in antiquities. Cole's diary is largely a painstaking description of Paris and the neighbourhood as he saw it in the last three months of 1765. Many of the convents, churches and monuments that he noticed were swept away in the Revolution of 1789. But the parson found space for comments on French ways that he did not like, and on the eminent persons, like Wilkes, of whom he did not approve. Walpole was in Paris at the time, but too indisposed to go antiquity hunting with his friend. The journal has been carefully edited by Mr. F. G. Stokes from the MS. which the author bequeathed with many others to the British Museum, and has an attractive introduction by Miss Helen Waddell, picturing Cole as a kindly and crotchety old scholar.
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