"Is the state of a bachelor aggravated and rendered less desirable? By
what means?"
"How much is paid per day for ploughing with two oxen? With two horses?"
"Which food has been experienced to be most portable and most nourishing
for keeping a distressed ship's crew from starving?"
"What is the value of whales of different sizes?"
In addition to such inquiries Berchtold[403] urges the necessity of
sketching landscapes and costumes, and better yet, the scientific
drawing of engines and complicated machines, and also of acquiring skill
on some musical instrument, to keep one from the gaming table in one's
idle hours, preferably of learning to play on a portable instrument,
such as a German flute. Journals, it goes without saying, must be
written every night before the traveller goes to sleep.
It is not only the fact of their being addressed to persons of small
intelligence which makes the guide-books of the eighteenth century seem
ridiculous; another reason for their ignoble tone is the increased
emphasis they lay on the material convenience of the traveller. Not the
service of one's country or the perfecting of one's character is the
note of Georgian injunctions, but the fear of being cheated and of being
sick. Misson's instructions begin at once with praise of fixed rates in
Holland, where one is spared the exhaustion of wrangling. The exact fare
from Cologne to Maintz is his next subject, and how one can hire a coach
and six horses for three crowns a day; how the best inns at Venice are
The Louvre, The White Lion, and The French Arms; how one can stay at The
Louvre for eight livres a day and pay seven or eight livres for a
gondola by the day, and so forth; with similar useful but uninspired
matter.
