Sad It Was To Be A Court Favourite Like Fulke Greville,
Who Four Times, Thirsting For Strange Lands, Was Plucked Back To England
By Elizabeth.
At about the time (1575) when some of the most prominent
courtiers - Edward Dyer, Gilbert Talbot, the Earl of Hertford, and more
especially Sir Christopher Hatton and Sir Philip Sidney - had just
returned from abroad, book-publishers thought it worth while to print
books addressed to travellers.
At least, there grew up a demand for
advice to young men which became a feature of Elizabethan literature,
printed and unprinted. It was the convention for a young man about to
travel to apply to some experienced or elderly friend, and for that
friend to disburden a torrent of maxims after the manner of Polonius.
John Florio, who knew the humours of his day, represents this in a
dialogue in Second Frutes.[38] So does Robert Greene in Greene's
Mourning Garment.[39] What were at first the personal warnings of a
wise man to his young friend, such as Cecil's letter to Rutland, grew
into a generalized oration for the use of any traveller. Hence arose
manuals of instruction - marvellous little books, full of incitements to
travel as the duty of man, summaries of the leading characteristics of
foreigners, directions for the care of sore feet - and a strange medley
of matters.
Among the first essays of this sort are translations from Germanic
writers, with whom, if Turler is right, the book of precepts for travel
originated.
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