Make Sure Choice
Both Of Your Company, And Discourse; Beware
You Never Speak A Truth -
PEREGRINE.
How!
SIR P. Not to strangers,
For those be they you must converse with most;
Others I would not
Know, sir, but at distance,
So as I still might be a saver in them:
You shall have tricks eke passed upon you hourly.
And then, for your religion, profess none,
But wonder at the diversity of all."[198]
Sir Henry Wotton's letter to Milton must not be left out of account of
Jacobean advice to travellers. It is brief, but very characteristic, for
it breathes the atmosphere of plots and caution. Admired for his great
experience and long sojourn abroad, in his old age, as Provost of Eton,
Sir Henry's advice was much sought after by fathers about to send their
sons on the Grand Tour. Forty-eight years after he himself set forth
beyond seas, he passed on to young John Milton "in procinct of his
travels," his favourite bit of wisdom, learned from a Roman courtier
well versed in the ways of Italy: "I pensieri stretti e il viso
sciolto."[199] Milton did not follow this Machiavellian precept to keep
his "thoughts close and his countenance loose," as Wotton translates
it,[200] and was soon marked by the Inquisition; but he was proud of
being advised by Sir Henry Wotton, and boasted of the "elegant letter"
and "exceedingly useful precepts" which the Provost bestowed on him at
his departure for Italy.[201]
So much for the admonitory side of instructions for travellers at the
opening of the seventeenth century. Italy, we see, was still feared as a
training-ground for "green wits." Bishop Hall succeeded Ascham in
denouncing the travel of young men who professed "to seek the glory of a
perfect breeding, and the perfection of that which we call civility."
Allowed to visit the Continent at an early age, "these lapwings, that go
from under the wing of their dam with the shell on their heads, run
wild." They hasten southwards, where in Italy they view the "proud
majesty of pompous ceremonies, wherewith the hearts of children and
fools are easily taken."[202] To the persuasive power of the Jesuits
Hall devotes several pages, and makes an impassioned plea to the
authorities to prevent Englishmen from travelling.
Parents could be easily alarmed by any possibility of their sons'
conversion to Romanism. For the penalties of being a Roman Catholic in
England were enough to make an ambitious father dread recusancy in his
son. Though a gentleman or a nobleman ran no risk of being hanged,
quartered, disembowelled and subjected to such punishments as were dealt
out to active and dangerous priests, he was regarded as a traitor if he
acknowledged himself to be a Romanist. At any moment of anti-Catholic
excitement he might be arrested and clapped into prison. Drearier than
prison must have been his social isolation. For he was cut off from his
generation and had no real part in the life of England.
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