"Lost in thoughtless ease and empty show,
Behold the warrior dwindled to a beau;
Sense, freedom, piety refined away,
Of France the mimick and of Spain the prey."[383]
A large section of society was inimical to the kind of education that the Earl of Chesterfield prescribed for his son. The earl was well aware of it, indeed, and marked with repugnance divers young bucks of his day with leathern breeches and unpowdered hair, who would exclaim; "Damn these finical outlandish airs, give me a manly resolute manner. They make a rout with their graces, and talk like a parcel of dancing masters, and dress like a parcel of fops; one good Englishman will beat three of them."[384]
Even during the height of the Grand Tour in the latter half of the seventeenth century, thoughtful minds, observing the effects of a foreign education as seen not only in the courtiers of Charles II., but in the dozens of obscure country gentlemen who painfully sought to acquire the habit of a Parisian Marquis by education abroad, noticed the weak points of such a system. The Earl of Clarendon thought it pernicious to send boys abroad until after they had gone through Oxford or Cambridge. There was no necessity for their getting the French accent at an early age, "as if we had no mind to be suspected to be Englishmen." That took them from their own country at just the age when they ought to have severe mental discipline, for the lack of which no amount of social training would make them competent men. "They return from travel with a wonderful confidence which may very well be called impudence ... all their learning is in wearing their clothes well; they have very much without their heads, very little within; and they are very much more solicitous that their periwigs fit handsomely, than to speak discreetly; they laugh at what they do not understand, which understanding so little, makes their laughter very immoderate. When they have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities which they brought over with them, fresh travellers arrive with newer fashions, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen."[385]
When these products of a French education could not remain in town, but were obliged to live on their estates amid rough country squires, it went hard with them. "They will by no means embrace our way," says The Country Gentleman in Clarendon's Dialogue of the Want of Respect Due to Age, "but receive us with cringes and treat us with set speeches, and complain how much it rains, that they cannot keep their hair dry, or their linnen handsome one hour. They talk how much a better country France is and how much they eat and drink better there, which our neighbors will not believe, and laugh at them for saying so. They by no means endure our exercises of hunting and hawking, nor indeed can their tender bodies endure those violent motions. They have a guitar or some other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their beds before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them, to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire. In a word, they live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know whether they eat and drink or no."[386]
Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation with local government, which was the chief duty of the country gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had learned little of the laws and customs of their own country. Clarendon draws a sad picture of the return of the native who was ashamed to be present at the public and private meetings for the administration of justice, because he had spent in dancing the time when he might have been storing knowledge, and who now passed his days a-bed, reading French romances of which he was tired.
Locke also set forth the fallacies of the Grand Tour in his Essay of Education. He admitted that fencing and riding the Great Horse were looked upon as "so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought a great omission to neglect them," but he questioned whether riding the Great Horse was "of moment enough to be made a business of."[387] Fencing, he pointed out, has very little to do with civil life, and is of no use in real warfare, while music "wastes so much of a young man's time, to gain but a moderate skill in it, and engages often in such odd company, that many think it much better spared."[388] But the feature of travel which was most mercilessly analysed by Locke was the Governor. He exposed the futility of sending a boy abroad to gain experience and to mingle with good society while he was so young as to need a guardian. For at the age when most boys were abroad--that is, from sixteen to twenty-two--they thought themselves too much men to be governed by others, and yet had not experience and prudence enough to govern themselves. Under the shelter of a Governor they were excused from being accountable for their own conduct and very seldom troubled themselves with inquiries or with making useful observations of their own.
While the Governor robbed his pupil of life's responsibilities on one hand, he hampered him, on the other, in any efforts to get into good company:
"I ask amongst our young men that go abroad under tutors what one is there of an hundred, that ever visits any person of quality? much less makes an acquaintance with such from whose conversation he may learn what is good breeding in that country and what is worth observation in it.... Nor indeed is it to be wondered. For men of worth and parts will not easily admit the familiarity of boys who yet need the care of a tutor: though a young gentleman and stranger, appearing like a man, and shewing a desire to inform himself in the customs, laws, and government of the country he is in, will find welcome, assistance and entertainment everywhere."[389]
These, and many comments of the same sort from other observers, made for the disintegration of the Grand Tour, and cast discredit upon it as a mode of education. Locke was not the only person who exposed the ineffectiveness of governors. They became a favourite subject of satire in the eighteenth century. Though even the best sort of "maître d'ours" or "bear-master," as the French called him, robbed travel of its proper effect, the best were seldom available for the hosts of boyish travellers. Generally the family chaplain was chosen, because of his cheapness, and this unfortunate was expected to restrain the boisterous devilment of the Peregrine Pickle committed to his care.[390] A booklet called The Bear-Leaders; or, Modern Travelling Stated in a Proper Light, sums up a biting condemnation of "our rugged unsocial Telemachuses and their unpolished Mentors," describing how someone in orders, perhaps a family dependent, is chosen as the Governor of the crude unprepared mortal embarking for a tour of Europe. "The Oddities, when introduced to each other, start back with mutual Astonishment, but after some time from a frequency of seeing, grow into a Coarse Fondness one for the other, expressed by Horse Laughs, or intimated by alternate Thumps on the Back, with all such other gentle insinuations of our uncivilized Male Hoydens."[391]