English Travellers of the Renaissance | Page 2

modern languages were founded at the English universities, and when, with the fall of the Stuarts, the Court ceased to be the arbiter of men's fortunes. In the course of this evolution they show us many phases of continental influence in England; how Italian immorality infected young imaginations, how the Jesuits won travellers to their religion, how France became the model of deportment, what were the origins of the Grand Tour, and so forth.
That these directions for travel were not isolated oddities of literature, but were the expression of a widespread ideal of the English gentry, I have tried to show in the following study. The essays can hardly be appreciated without support from biography and history, and for that reason I have introduced some concrete illustrations of the sort of traveller to whom the books were addressed. If I have not always quoted the "Instructions" fully, it is because they repeat one another on some points. My plan has been to comment on whatever in each book was new, or showed the evolution of travel for study's sake.
The result, I hope, will serve to show something of the cosmopolitanism of English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; of the closer contact which held between England and the Continent, while England was not yet great and self-sufficient; of times when her soldiers of low and high degree went to seek their fortunes in the Low Countries, and her merchants journeyed in person to conduct business with Italy; when a steady stream of Roman Catholics and exiles for political reasons trooped to France or Flanders for years together.
These discussions of the art of travel are relics of an age when Englishmen, next to the Germans, were known for the greatest travellers among all nations. In the same boat-load with merchants, spies, exiles, and diplomats from England sailed the young gentleman fresh from his university, to complete his education by a look at the most civilized countries of the world. He approached the Continent with an inquiring, open mind, eager to learn, quick to imitate the refinements and ideas of countries older than his own. For the same purpose that now takes American students to England, or Japanese students to America, the English striplings once journeyed to France, comparing governments and manners, watching everything, noting everything, and coming home to benefit their country by new ideas.
I hope, also, that a review of these forgotten volumes may lend an added pleasure to the reading of books greater than themselves in Elizabethan literature. One cannot fully appreciate the satire of Amorphus's claim to be "so sublimated and refined by travel," and to have "drunk in the spirit of beauty in some eight score and eighteen princes' courts where I have resided,"[1] unless one has read of the benefits of travel as expounded by the current Instructions for Travellers; nor the dialogues between Sir Politick-Would-be and Peregrine in _Volpone, or the Fox_. Shakespeare, too, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, has taken bodily the arguments of the Elizabethan orations in praise of travel:
"Some to the warres, to try their fortune there; Some, to discover Islands farre away; Some, to the studious Universities; For any, or for all these exercises, He said, thou Proteus, your sonne was meet; And did request me, to importune you To let him spend his time no more at home; Which would be great impeachment to his age, In having knowne no travaile in his youth. (Antonio) Nor need'st thou much importune me to that Whereon, this month I have been hamering, I have considered well, his losse of time, And how he cannot be a perfect man, Not being tryed, and tutored in the world; Experience is by industry atchiev'd, And perfected by the swift course of time."
(Act I. Sc. iii.)
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CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRAVEL FOR CULTURE
Pilgrimages at the close of the Middle Ages--New objects for travel in the fifteenth century--Humanism--Diplomatic ambition--Linguistic acquirement.

CHAPTER II
THE HIGH PURPOSE OF THE ELIZABETHAN TRAVELLER
Development of the individual--Benefit to the Commonwealth--First books addressed to travellers.

CHAPTER III
SOME CYNICAL ASPERSIONS UPON THE BENEFITS OF TRAVEL
The Italianate Englishman.

CHAPTER IV
PERILS FOR PROTESTANT TRAVELLERS
The Inquisition--The Jesuits--Penalties of recusancy.

CHAPTER V
THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH ACADEMIES
France the arbiter of manners in the seventeenth century--Riding the great horse--Attempts to establish academies in England--Why travellers neglected Spain.

CHAPTER VI
THE GRAND TOUR
Origin of the term--Governors for young travellers--Expenses of travel.

CHAPTER VII
THE DECADENCE OF THE GRAND TOUR
The decline of the courtier--Foundation of chairs of Modern History and Modern Languages at Oxford and Cambridge--Englishmen become self-sufficient--Books of travel become common--Advent of the Romantic traveller who travels for scenery.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
FOOTNOTES
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CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRAVEL FOR CULTURE
Of the many social impulses that were influenced by the Renaissance, by that "new lernynge which runnythe all the world over now-a-days," the love of travel