1914
PREFACE
This essay was written in 1908-1910 while I was studying at Oxford as Fellow of the Society of American Women in London. Material on the subject of travel in any century is apparently inexhaustible, and one could write many books on the subject without duplicating sources. The following aims no further than to describe one phase of Renaissance travel in clear and sharp outline, with sufficient illustration to embellish but not to clog the main ideas.
In the preparation of this book I incurred many debts of gratitude. I would thank the staff of the Bodleian, especially Mr W.H.B. Somerset, for their kindness during the two years I was working in the library of Oxford University; and Dr Perlbach, Abteilungsdirektor of the Königliche Bibliothek at Berlin, who forwarded to me some helpful information concerning the early German books of instructions for travellers; and Professor Clark S. Northup, of Cornell University, for similar aid. To Mr George Whale I am indebted for the use of his transcript of Sloane MS. 1813, and to my friend Miss M.E. Marshall, of the Board of Trade, for the generous gift of her leisure hours in reading for me in the British Museum after the sea had divided me from that treasure-house of information.
I would like to acknowledge with thanks the kind advice of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Sidney Lee, whose generosity in giving time and scholarship many students besides myself are in a position to appreciate. Mr L. Pearsall Smith, from whose work on the Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton I have drawn copiously, gave me also courteous personal assistance.
To the Faculty of the English Department at Columbia University I owe the gratitude of one who has received her earliest inclination to scholarship from their teachings. I am under heavy obligations to Professor A.H. Thorndike and Professor G.P. Krapp for their corrections and suggestions in the proof-sheets of this book, and to Professor W.P. Trent for continued help and encouragement throughout my studies at Columbia and elsewhere.
Above all, I wish to emphasize the aid of Professor C.H. Firth, of Oxford University, whose sympathy and comprehension of the difficulties of a beginner in the field he so nobly commands can be understood only by those, like myself, who come to Oxford aspiring and alone. I wish this essay were a more worthy result of his influence.
CLARE HOWARD
BARNARD COLLEGE, NEW YORK
INTRODUCTION
Among the many didactic books which flooded England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were certain essays on travel. Some of these have never been brought to light since their publication more than three hundred years ago, or been mentioned by the few writers who have interested themselves in the literature of this subject. In the collections of voyages and explorations, so often garnered, these have found no place. Most of them are very rare, and have never been reprinted. Yet they do not deserve to be thus overlooked, and in several ways this survey of them will, I think, be useful for students of literature.
They reveal a widespread custom among Elizabethan and Jacobean gentlemen, of completing their education by travel. There are scattered allusions to this practice, in contemporary social documents: Anthony à Wood frequently explains how such an Oxonian "travelled beyond seas and returned a compleat Person,"--but nowhere is this ideal of a cosmopolitan education so explicitly set forth as it is in these essays. Addressed to the intending tourist, they are in no sense to be confused with guide-books or itineraries. They are discussions of the benefits of travel, admonitions and warnings, arranged to put the traveller in the proper attitude of mind towards his great task of self-development. Taken in chronological order they outline for us the life of the travelling student.
Beginning with the end of the sixteenth century when travel became the fashion, as the only means of acquiring modern languages and modern history, as well as those physical accomplishments and social graces by which a young man won his way at Court, they trace his evolution up to the time when it had no longer any serious motive; that is, when the chairs of modern history and modern languages were founded at the English universities, and when, with the fall of the Stuarts, the Court ceased to be the arbiter of men's fortunes. In the course of this evolution they show us many phases of continental influence in England; how Italian immorality infected young imaginations, how the Jesuits won travellers to their religion, how France became the model of deportment, what were the origins of the Grand Tour, and so forth.
That these directions for travel were not isolated oddities of literature, but were the expression of a widespread ideal of the English gentry, I have tried to show in the following study. The essays can hardly be appreciated without support from biography and history, and for that reason I have introduced some concrete illustrations of the sort of traveller to whom the books were addressed. If I have not always quoted the "Instructions" fully, it is because they repeat one another on some points. My plan has been to comment on whatever in each book was new, or showed the evolution of travel for study's sake.
The result, I hope, will serve to show something of the cosmopolitanism of English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; of the closer contact which held between England and the Continent, while England was not yet great and self-sufficient; of times when her soldiers of low and high degree went to seek their fortunes in the Low Countries, and her merchants journeyed in person to conduct business with Italy; when a steady stream of Roman Catholics and exiles for political reasons trooped to France or Flanders for years together.
These discussions of the art of travel are relics of an age when Englishmen, next to the Germans, were known for the greatest travellers among all nations. In the same boat-load with merchants, spies, exiles, and diplomats from England sailed the young gentleman fresh from his university, to complete his education by a look at the most civilized countries of the world. He approached the Continent with an inquiring, open mind, eager to learn, quick to imitate the refinements and ideas of countries older than his own. For the same purpose that now takes American students to England, or Japanese students to America, the English striplings once journeyed to France, comparing governments and manners, watching everything, noting everything, and coming home to benefit their country by new ideas.
I hope, also, that a review of these forgotten volumes may lend an added pleasure to the reading of books greater than themselves in Elizabethan literature. One cannot fully appreciate the satire of Amorphus's claim to be "so sublimated and refined by travel," and to have "drunk in the spirit of beauty in some eight score and eighteen princes' courts where I have resided,"[1] unless one has read of the benefits of travel as expounded by the current Instructions for Travellers; nor the dialogues between Sir Politick-Would-be and Peregrine in Volpone, or the Fox. Shakespeare, too, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, has taken bodily the arguments of the Elizabethan orations in praise of travel:
"Some to the warres, to try their fortune there;
Some, to discover Islands farre away;
Some, to the studious Universities;
For any, or for all these exercises,
He said, thou Proteus, your sonne was meet;
And did request me, to importune you
To let him spend his time no more at home;
Which would be great impeachment to his age,
In having knowne no travaile in his youth.
(Antonio) Nor need'st thou much importune me to that
Whereon, this month I have been hamering,
I have considered well, his losse of time,
And how he cannot be a perfect man,
Not being tryed, and tutored in the world;
Experience is by industry atchiev'd,
And perfected by the swift course of time."
(Act I. Sc. iii.)
CONTENTS
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRAVEL FOR CULTURE
Pilgrimages at the close of the Middle Ages--New objects for travel in the fifteenth century--Humanism--Diplomatic ambition--Linguistic acquirement.
THE HIGH PURPOSE OF THE ELIZABETHAN TRAVELLER
Development of the individual--Benefit to the Commonwealth--First books addressed to travellers.
SOME CYNICAL ASPERSIONS UPON THE BENEFITS OF TRAVEL
The Italianate Englishman.
PERILS FOR PROTESTANT TRAVELLERS
The Inquisition--The Jesuits--Penalties of recusancy.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH ACADEMIES
France the arbiter of manners in the seventeenth century--Riding the great horse--Attempts to establish academies in England--Why travellers neglected Spain.
THE GRAND TOUR
Origin of the term--Governors for young travellers--Expenses of travel.
THE DECADENCE OF THE GRAND TOUR
The decline of the courtier--Foundation of chairs of Modern History and Modern Languages at Oxford and Cambridge--Englishmen become self-sufficient--Books of travel become common--Advent of the Romantic traveller who travels for scenery.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
From an engraving by J. Hall, after Moses Griffith
[EDWARD DE VERE, SEVENTEENTH EARL OF OXFORD]
From an engraving by J. Brown, after G.P. Harding
[FRANCIS MANNERS, SIXTH EARL OF RUTLAND]
[DUDLEY NORTH, THIRD BARON NORTH]
From a print of an original picture in the collection of the Earl of Guildford
[JOHN HARINGTON, SECOND BARON HARINGTON OF EXTON]
An illustration from "Nuove Inventione di Balli," an Italian book of
instructions in dancing much prized by James I.
[SKETCHING ON THE SHORES OF LAKE AVERNUS IN 1610]
[TENNIS AS PLAYED IN PARIS IN 1632]
From a contemporary caricature
[RIDING THE GREAT HORSE, AS TAUGHT BY ANTOINE
PLUVINEL]
, THE RIDING-MASTER OF LOUIS XIII.
From "Le Maneige Royal" by Antoine Pluvinel
, 1624
[AN ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS]