Holland Was Of Peculiar Delight To The Traveller Of The Seventeenth
Century Because It Contained So Many Curiosities And Rareties.
To ferret
out objects of vertu the Jacobean gentleman would take any journey.
People with cabinets of butterflies, miniatures,
Shells, ivory, or
Indian beads, were pestered by tourists asking to see their
treasures.[293] No garden was so entrancing to them as one that had "a
rupellary nidary"[294] or an aviary with eagles, cranes, storks,
bustards, ducks with four wings, or with rabbits of an almost perfect
yellow colour.[295] Holland, therefore, where ships brought precious
curiosities from all over the world, was a heaven for the virtuoso.
Evelyn in Rotterdam hovered between his delight in the brass statue of
Erasmus and a pelican, which he carefully describes. The great charm of
Dutch inns for Sam Paterson was their hoards of China and Japan ware and
the probability you had of meeting a purring marmot, a squeaking
guinea-pig, or a tame rabbit with a collar of bells, hopping through the
house.[296]
But we have dwelt too long, perhaps, on those who voyaged to see
knick-knacks, and to gain accomplishments at French academies. Though
the academies were characteristic of the seventeenth century, there were
other centres of education sought by Englishmen abroad. The study of
medicine, particularly, took many students to Padua or Paris, for the
Continent was far ahead of England in scientific work.[297] Sir Thomas
Browne's son studied anatomy at Padua with Sir John Finch, who had
settled there and was afterwards chosen syndic of the university.[298]
At Paris Martin Lister, though in the train of the English Ambassador,
principally enjoyed "Mr Bennis in the dissecting-room working by himself
upon a dead body," and "took more pleasure to see Monsieur Breman in his
white waistcoat digging in the royal physic-garden and sowing his
couches, than Mounsieur de Saintot making room for an ambassador": and
found himself better disposed and more apt to learn the names and
physiognomy of a hundred plants, than of five or six princes.[299]
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