The Exact Fare From Cologne To Maintz Is His Next Subject, And How One Can Hire A Coach And Six

Horses for three crowns a day; how the best inns at Venice are The Louvre, The White Lion, and The

French Arms; how one can stay at The Louvre for eight livres a day and pay seven or eight livres for a gondola by the day, and so forth; with similar useful but uninspired matter. Next he discusses sea-sickness, and informs us that the best remedy is to keep always, night and day, a piece of earth under the nose; for which purpose you should provide a sufficient quantity of earth and preserve it fresh in a pot of clay; and when you have used a piece so long that it begins to grow dry, put it again into the pot, and take out some fresh earth.[404]

Berchtold's suggestions for comfort are even more elaborate. One should carry everywhere:

"A bottle of vinegar, de quatre voleurs. Ditto best French Brandy. Ditto spirit of Salmiac, against fits. Ditto Hoffman's Drops."

At inns it is advisable to air the room by throwing a little strong vinegar upon a red hot shovel, and to bring your bed-clothes with you. As a guard against robbers it is advisable to have your servant sleep in the same room with you, keep a wax candle burning all night, and look into the chests and behind the bed before retiring. Pocket door-bolts in the form of a cross are easily obtainable; if not, put the tables and chair against the door.

There is something fussy about such a traveller, though robbers undoubtedly were to be feared, even in the eighteenth century,[405] and though inns were undoubtedly dirty. A repugnance to dirt and discomfort is justifiable enough, but there is something especially peevish in the tone of many Georgian travellers. Sam Sharp's Letters from Italy breathe only sorrow, disillusion and indignation. Italian beds and vermin, Italian post-boys and their sorry nags are too frequently the theme of his discourse. He even assures us that the young gentlemen whom he had always pictured as highly delighted by the Grand Tour are in reality very homesick for England. They are weary of the interminable drives and interminable conversazioni of Italy and long for the fox-hunting of Great Britain.[406] Fielding's account of his voyage to Lisbon contains too much about his wife's toothache and his own dropsy.[407] Smollett, like Fielding, was a sick man at the time of his travels, and we can excuse his rage at the unswept floors, old rotten tables, crazy chairs and beds so disgusting that he generally wrapped himself in a great-coat and lay upon four chairs with a leathern portmanteau for a pillow; but we cannot admire a man who is embittered by the fact that he cannot get milk to put in his tea, and is continually thrusting his head out of the window to curse at the post-boys, or pulling out his post-book to read to an inn-yard with savage vociferation the article which orders that the traveller who comes first shall be first served.[408]

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