Parenting & Family Quote by Richard Francis Burton

Travel, in Burton's hands, isn't self-improvement; it's a performance of force. The line snaps with the impatience of a man who believed access was won less by politeness than by calibrated menace. By pairing travellers with poets, Burton flatters the romantic myth of the sensitive wanderer, then immediately undercuts it: this is an "angry race", not a noble one. The joke lands because it’s half confession, half indictment. He knows the pose is ridiculous. He also knows it works.

The key move is tactical emotional display: "a daily fit of passion" as proof of sincerity. In the colonial and courtly settings Burton moved through, attention from "the governor and his son" could be both hospitality and surveillance, courtesy and containment. Burton reads the social script and chooses to tear it. Anger becomes a kind of passport. If you can afford to be difficult, you must be important; if you dare to be insulting, you must have backing. He's signaling that he's not a pliable tourist, not a petitioner, not someone who can be gently managed.

The subtext is darker than mere curmudgeonliness. Burton implies that "earnestness" is not an inner virtue but an outward coercion, a readiness to impose your will on the room until it yields. It's an explorer's ethos stripped of romance: the world opens, he suggests, to those who can make others uncomfortable on schedule.