It Was Necessary Also To Warn The Traveller Against Those More Harmless
Sins Which We Have Already Mentioned:
Against an arrogant bearing on his
return to his native land, or a vanity which prompted him at all
Times
to show that he had been abroad, and was not like the common herd.
Perhaps it was an intellectual affectation of atheism or a cultivated
taste for Machiavelli with which he was inclined to startle his
old-fashioned countrymen. Almost the only book Sir Edward Unton seems to
have brought back with him from Venice was the Historie of Nicolo
Machiavelli, Venice, 1537. On the title page he has written:
"Macchavelli Maxima / Qui nescit dissimulare / nescit vivere / Vive et
vivas / Edw. Unton. /"[120] Perhaps it was only his display of Italian
clothes - "civil, because black, and comely because fitted to the
body,"[121] or daintier table manners than Englishmen used which called
down upon him the ridicule of his enemies. No doubt there was in the
returned traveller a certain degree of condescension which made him
disagreeable - especially if he happened to be a proud and insolent
courtier, who attracted the Queen's notice by his sharpened wits and
novelties of discourse, or if he were a vain boy of the sort that
cumbered the streets of London with their rufflings and struttings.
In making surmises as to whom Ascham had in his mind's eye when he said
that he knew men who came back from Italy with "less learning and worse
manners," I guessed that one might be Arthur Hall, the first translator
of Homer into English. Hall was a promising Grecian at Cambridge, and
began his translation with Ascham's encouragement.[122] Between 1563 and
1568, when Ascham was writing The Scolemaster, Hall, without finishing
for a degree, or completing the Homer, went to Italy. It would have
irritated Ascham to have a member of St John's throw over his task and
his degree to go gadding. Certainly Hall's after life bore out Ascham's
forebodings as to the value of foreign travel. On his return he spent a
notorious existence in London until the consequences of a tavern brawl
turned him out of Parliament. I might dwell for a moment on Hall's
curious account of this latter affair, because it is one of the few
utterances we have by an acknowledged Italianate Englishman - of a
certain sort.
Hall, apparently, was one of those gallants who ruffled about
Elizabethan London and used
"To loove to play at Dice
To sware his blood and hart
To face it with a Ruffins look
And set his Hat athwart."[123]
The humorists throw a good deal of light on such "yong Jyntelmen." So
does Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, to whom they used to run when
they were arrested for debt, or for killing a carman, making as their
only apology, "I am a Jyntelman, and being a Jyntelman, I am not thus to
be used at a slave and a colion's hands."[124] Hall, writing in the
third person, in the assumed character of a friend, describes himself as
"a man not wholly unlearned, with a smacke of the knowledge of diverse
tongues ... furious when he is contraried ... as yourselfe is witnesse
of his dealings at Rome, at Florence, in the way between that and
Bollonia ... so implacable if he conceyve an injurie, as Sylla will
rather be pleased with Marius, than he with his equals, in a maner for
offences grown of tryffles.... Also spending more tyme in sportes, and
following the same, than is any way commendable, and the lesse, bycause,
I warrant you, the summes be great are dealte for." [125]
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