He published three works of that kind: 'Rambling Notes and Reflections,’ London, 1827 (visit to France); 'Visit to Germany and the Low Countries,’ 1829–30–1831, 2 vols.
These writings are excellent of their kind, and are interspersed with many remarks on home affairs, which, as he says, 'have no more to do with a tour to Paris than with the discovery of the north-west passage,’ but are inserted with 'an atrocious obstinacy proceeding from the hope of doing some good, against the clear evidence of all experience to the contrary.'
Out of these remarks sprang the following pamphlets: 'Reply to Clerical Objections,' 1828; 'Letters to the College of Physicians,' 1829 (advising them to give up antiquated privileges and assume new duties); 'Letter to the Lord Chancellor,' 1834 (protesting against Brougham's defence of the established church and advocating 'a reform in the ministrations of a religion of which your lordship's life is a conspicuous ornament'); and a 'Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury,' 1840 (on such grievances as non-residence of the clergy and the flight of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol to Malvern when the cholera was in Bristol in 1832).
Describing his own subscription at Oxford, he says: 'Down went my name, and down went my fees; and the degree was forthcoming, signed, sealed, and delivered, with a bouquet of flowers to boot.'
His political creed was that 'as sure as a lobster turns red by boiling, a whig grows tory when long in power.
His most entertaining work, the 'Visit to Germany' (1833), is dedicated to the Duke of Sussex, whom he claims as in sympathy with his general views and as an enemy of 'obscurantism.'