Travellers Were Never Done Exclaiming At Its Municipal
Governments, Its Reformatories And Workhouses, Its Industry, Frugality,
And Social Economy.
The neat buildings, elegant streets, and quiet inns,
were the subject of many encomiums.[288]
Descartes, who chose Amsterdam as the place in which to think out his
philosophy, praised it as the ideal retreat for students, contending
that it was far better for them than Italy, with its plagues, heat,
unwholesome evenings, murder and robbery.[289] Locke, when he went into
voluntary exile in 1684, enjoyed himself with the doctors and men of
letters in Amsterdam, attending by special invitation of the principal
physician of the city the dissection of a lioness, or discussing knotty
problems of theology with the wealthy Quaker merchants.[290] Courtiers
were charmed with the sea-shore at Scheveningen, where on the hard sand,
admirably contrived by nature for the divertisement of persons of
quality, the foreign ambassadors and their ladies, and the society of
the Hague, drove in their coaches and six horses.[291] However, Sir
William Temple, after some years spent as Ambassador to the Netherlands,
decided that Holland was a place where a man would choose rather to
travel than to live, because it was a country where there was more sense
than wit, more wealth than pleasure, and where one would find more
persons to esteem than to love.[292]
Holland was of peculiar delight to the traveller of the seventeenth
century because it contained so many curiosities and rareties. To ferret
out objects of vertu the Jacobean gentleman would take any journey.
People with cabinets of butterflies, miniatures, shells, ivory, or
Indian beads, were pestered by tourists asking to see their
treasures.[293] No garden was so entrancing to them as one that had "a
rupellary nidary"[294] or an aviary with eagles, cranes, storks,
bustards, ducks with four wings, or with rabbits of an almost perfect
yellow colour.[295] Holland, therefore, where ships brought precious
curiosities from all over the world, was a heaven for the virtuoso.
Evelyn in Rotterdam hovered between his delight in the brass statue of
Erasmus and a pelican, which he carefully describes. The great charm of
Dutch inns for Sam Paterson was their hoards of China and Japan ware and
the probability you had of meeting a purring marmot, a squeaking
guinea-pig, or a tame rabbit with a collar of bells, hopping through the
house.[296]
But we have dwelt too long, perhaps, on those who voyaged to see
knick-knacks, and to gain accomplishments at French academies. Though
the academies were characteristic of the seventeenth century, there were
other centres of education sought by Englishmen abroad. The study of
medicine, particularly, took many students to Padua or Paris, for the
Continent was far ahead of England in scientific work.[297] Sir Thomas
Browne's son studied anatomy at Padua with Sir John Finch, who had
settled there and was afterwards chosen syndic of the university.[298]
At Paris Martin Lister, though in the train of the English Ambassador,
principally enjoyed "Mr Bennis in the dissecting-room working by himself
upon a dead body," and "took more pleasure to see Monsieur Breman in his
white waistcoat digging in the royal physic-garden and sowing his
couches, than Mounsieur de Saintot making room for an ambassador": and
found himself better disposed and more apt to learn the names and
physiognomy of a hundred plants, than of five or six princes.[299]
It was medicine that chiefly interested Nicholas Ferrar, than whom no
traveller for study's sake was ever more devoted to the task of
self-improvement. At about the same time that the second Earl of
Chesterfield was fighting duels at the academy of Monsieur de Veau,
Nicholas Ferrar, a grave boy, came from Cambridge to Leipsic and "set
himself laboriously to study the originals of the city, the nature of
the government, the humors and inclinations of the people." Finding the
university too distracting, he retired to a neighbouring village to read
the choicest writers on German affairs. He served an apprenticeship of a
fortnight at every German trade. He could maintain a dialogue with an
architect in his own phrases; he could talk with mariners in their sea
terms. Removing to Padua, he attained in a very short time a marvellous
proficiency in physic, while his conversation and his charm ennobled the
evil students of Padua.[300]
* * * * *
CHAPTER VI
THE GRAND TOUR
After the Restoration the idea of polishing one's parts by foreign
travel received fresh impetus. The friends of Charles the Second, having
spent so much of their time abroad, naturally brought back to England a
renewed infusion of continental ideals. France was more than ever the
arbiter for the "gentry and civiller sort of mankind." Travellers such
as Evelyn, who deplored the English gentry's "solitary and unactive
lives in the country," the "haughty and boorish Englishman," and the
"constrained address of our sullen Nation,"[301] made an impression. It
was generally acknowledged that comity and affability had to be fetched
from beyond the Seas, for the "meer Englishman" was defective in those
qualities. He was "rough in address, not easily acquainted, and blunt
even when he obliged."[302]
Even wise and honest Englishmen began to be ashamed of their manners and
felt they must try to be not quite so English. "Put on a decent
boldness," writes Sir Thomas Browne constantly to his son in France.
"Shun pudor rusticus." "Practise an handsome garb and civil boldness
which he that learneth not in France, travaileth in vain."[303]
But there was this difference in travel to complete the gentleman during
the reign of Charles the Second: that Italy and Germany were again safe
and thrown open to travellers, so that Holland, Germany, Italy, and
France made a magnificent round of sights; namely, the Grand Tour. It
was still usual to spend some time in Paris learning exercises and
accomplishments at an academy, but a large proportion of effort went to
driving by post-chaise through the principal towns of Europe.
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