Learning, For Which Men Once Had Travelled Into
Italy, Was No Longer Confined There.
Nor did the Cavaliers desire exact
classical learning.
A knowledge of mythology, culled from French
translations, was sufficient. Accomplishments, such as riding, fencing,
and dancing, were what chiefly helped them, it appeared, to make their
way at Court or at camp. And the best instruction in these
accomplishments had shifted from Italy to France.
A change had come over the ideal of a gentleman - a reaction from the
Tudor enthusiasm for letters. A long time had gone by since Henry VIII.
tried to make his children as learned as Erasmus, and had the most
erudite scholars fetched from Oxford and Cambridge to direct the royal
nursery. The somewhat moderated esteem in which book-learning was held
in the household of Charles I. may be seen in a letter of the Earl of
Newcastle, governor to Prince Charles,[206] who writes to his pupil:
"I would not have you too studious, for too much contemplation spoils
action, and Virtue consists in that." The Prince's model is to be the
Bishop of Chichester, his tutor, who "hath no pedantry in him: his
learning he makes right use of, neither to trouble himself with it or
his friends: ... reades men as well as books: ... is travell'd, which
you shall perceive by his wisdome and fashion more than by his
relations; and in a word strives as much discreetly to hide the scholler
in him, as other men's follies studies to shew it:
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