They By No
Means Endure Our Exercises Of Hunting And Hawking, Nor Indeed Can Their
Tender Bodies Endure Those Violent Motions.
They have a guitar or some
other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their
Beds
before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them,
to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen
to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the
cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire. In a word, they
live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know
whether they eat and drink or no."[386]
Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and
unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation
with local government, which was the chief duty of the country
gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had
learned little of the laws and customs of their own country. Clarendon
draws a sad picture of the return of the native who was ashamed to be
present at the public and private meetings for the administration of
justice, because he had spent in dancing the time when he might have
been storing knowledge, and who now passed his days a-bed, reading
French romances of which he was tired.
Locke also set forth the fallacies of the Grand Tour in his Essay of
Education. He admitted that fencing and riding the Great Horse were
looked upon as "so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought
a great omission to neglect them," but he questioned whether riding the
Great Horse was "of moment enough to be made a business of."[387]
Fencing, he pointed out, has very little to do with civil life, and is
of no use in real warfare, while music "wastes so much of a young man's
time, to gain but a moderate skill in it, and engages often in such odd
company, that many think it much better spared."[388] But the feature of
travel which was most mercilessly analysed by Locke was the Governor.
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