Melmoth The Wanderer, Volume 1 by Charles Maturin

Apparebat eidolon _senex_. PLINY.

The manuscript was discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader. Michaelis himself, scrutinizing into the pretended autograph of St Mark at Venice, never had a harder time of it. -- Melmoth could make out only a sentence here and there. The writer, it appeared, was an Englishman of the name of Stanton, who had travelled abroad shortly after the Restoration. Travelling was not then attended with the facilities which modern improvement has introduced, and scholars and literati, the intelligent, the idle, and the curious, wandered over the Continent for years, like _Tom Coryat_, though they had the modesty, on their return, to entitle the result of their multiplied observations and labours only "crudities."