11.
engenders smartness of imagination, and even in the most favorable reviews, as those which appeared in Chambers' Journal, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review, there are clear indications of the doubts entertained by the writers. Most of the reviewers doubted the story told by Cornwallis of having actually seen a harakiri. The London Spectator Supplement questioned Cornwallis' identification of the Washington islands. Chambers' Journal felt that Cornwallis' estimate of Japanese characteristics was "much too exalted" and that some of the incidents told by Cornwallis wore difficult to believe. The fact that Cornwallis once denies the use of tables and chairs in Japan and then describes their use was at least contradictory, according to the reviewer in the Athenaeum, and both the Athenaeum and the British Quarterly Review found that Cornwallis' studies of the Japanese in the nude were a bit incredible. In the words of the critic in the Saturday Review, Cornwallis, "on his own showing," classifies as "one of those singular persons to whom singular occurrences are always happening in the most singularly appropriate way." More sharply, the reviewer in the Literary Gazette declared that Cornwallis "has never seen the things he writes of so glibly, nor done the feats that he recounts."
Cornwallis' Two Journeys is indeed a tissue of statements that are often diverting but too frequently contrary to fact. There is, for instance, the picture which Cornwallis
