These Comments Are What One Expects From Oxford, To Be Sure, But Even M. Jusserand Acknowledges That The Academies Were Not Centres Of Intellectual Light, And Quotes To Prove It Certain Questions Asked Of A Pupil Put Into The Bastille, At The Demand Of His Father:

"Was it not true that the Sieur Varin, his father, seeing that he had no inclination to study, had put him into the Academie Royale to there learn all sorts of exercises, and had there supported him with much expense?

"He admitted that his father, while his mother was living, had put him into the Academie Royale and had given him for that the necessary means, and paid the ordinary pension, 1600 livres a year.

"Was it not true that after having been some time at the Academie Royale, he was expelled, having disguised girls in boys' clothes to bring them there?

"He denied it. He had never introduced into the school any academiste feminine: he had departed at the summons of his father, having taken proper leave of M. and Mme. de Poix."[271]

However, something of an education had to be provided for Royalist boys at the time of the Civil War, when Oxford was demoralized. Parents wandering homeless on the Continent were glad enough of the academies. Even the Stuarts tried them, though the Duke of Gloucester had to be weaned from the company of some young French gallants, "who, being educated in the same academy, were more familiar with him than was thought convenient."[272] It was a choice between academies or such an education as Edmund Verney endured in a dull provincial city as the sole pupil of an exiled Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But the effects of being reared in France, and too early thrown into the dissolute Courts of Europe, were evident at the Restoration, when Charles the Second and his friends returned to startle England with their "exceeding wildness." What else could be the effect of a youth spent as the Earl of Chesterfield records:[273] at thirteen years old a courtier at St Germaine: at fourteen, rid of any governor or tutor: at sixteen, at the academy of M. de Veau, he "chanced to have a quarrel with M. Morvay, since Captaine of the French King's Guards, who I hurt and disarmed in a duel." Thereupon he left the academy and took up his abode at the Court of Turin. It was from Italy, De Gramont said, that Chesterfield brought those elaborate manners, and that jealousy about women, for which he was so notorious among the rakes of the Restoration.[274]

Henry Peacham's chapter "Of Travaile"[275] is for the most part built out of Dallington's advice, but it is worthy of note that in The Compleat Gentleman, Spain is pressed upon the traveller's attention for the first time. This is, of course, the natural reflection of an interest in Spain due to the romantic adventures of Prince Charles and Buckingham in that country.

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