Italian Beds And Vermin, Italian Post-Boys And Their Sorry Nags Are Too Frequently The Theme Of His Discourse.

He even assures us that the young gentlemen whom he had always pictured as highly delighted by the Grand Tour are in reality very homesick for England.

They are weary of the interminable drives and interminable conversazioni of Italy and long for the fox-hunting of Great Britain.[406] Fielding's account of his voyage to Lisbon contains too much about his wife's toothache and his own dropsy.[407] Smollett, like Fielding, was a sick man at the time of his travels, and we can excuse his rage at the unswept floors, old rotten tables, crazy chairs and beds so disgusting that he generally wrapped himself in a great-coat and lay upon four chairs with a leathern portmanteau for a pillow; but we cannot admire a man who is embittered by the fact that he cannot get milk to put in his tea, and is continually thrusting his head out of the window to curse at the post-boys, or pulling out his post-book to read to an inn-yard with savage vociferation the article which orders that the traveller who comes first shall be first served.[408]

This is a degeneration from the undaunted mettle of the Elizabethans, who, though acquainted with dirty inns and cheating landlords, kept their spirits soaring above the material difficulties of travel. We miss, in eighteenth century accounts, the gaiety of Roger Ascham's Report of Germany and of the fair barge with goodly glass windows in which he went up the Rhine - gaiety which does not fail even when he had to spend the night in the barge, with his tired head on his saddle for a bolster.[409] We miss the spirit of good fellowship with which John Taylor, the Water Poet, shared with six strangers in the coach from Hamburgh the ribs of roast beef brought with him from Great Britain.[410] Vastly diverting as the eighteenth-century travel-books sometimes are, there is nothing in them that warms the heart like the travels of poor Tom Coryat, that infatuated tourist, chief of the tribe of Gad, whom nothing daunted in his determination to see the world. Often he slept in wagons and in open skiffs, and though he could not afford to hire the guides with Sedan chairs who took men over the Alpine passes in those days, yet he followed them on foot, panting.[411]

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