It was less than twenty years after Hentzner that another German published a record of travel which was also meant as a guide. But time had worked wonders; it was not only a personal difference between the former and Zinzerling that accounts for the difference in their books; it was the increase in the number of tourists. The latter sketches out a plan by means of which all France can be seen at the most convenient times and most thoroughly without waste of time, with excursions to England, the Low Countries, and Spain. Routes are his first consideration; other hints abound. At St. Nicholas is a host who is a terror to strangers; and remember that at Saint-Savin, thirty leagues from Bourges, is the shanty of "Philemon and Baucis" where you can live for next to nothing; and that outside the gate at Poictiers is a chemist who speaks German, and so on. Frequently, indeed, he notes where you may find your German understood; and also where you should learn, and where avoid learning, French.
Advice of this last-mentioned kind calls to mind a third class of guide-books, intended to assist those who, without them, would realise how vain is the help of man when he can't understand what you say. The need for such became more and more evident as time went on and Latin became less and less the living and international language it had been but recently. The use of vernaculars was everywhere coming to the front as nationalities developed further, and in many districts where it had been best known its disuse in Church hastened its disuse outside.
The extent to which Latin was current about 1600 varied in almost every country. Poland and Ireland came first, Germany second, where many of all classes spoke it fluently, and less corruptly than in Poland. Yet an Englishman[18] passing through Germany in 1655 found but one innkeeper who could speak it. The date suggests that the Thirty Years' War was responsible for the change. It is certainly true that France in the previous half century was far behind Germany in the matter of speaking Latin, as a result of the civil wars there. Possibly the characters of its rulers had something to do with this too, just as in England, where Latin was ordinarily spoken by the upper classes, according to Moryson, with ease and correctness, the accomplishments of Queen Elizabeth as a linguist had doubtless set a fashion. This much, at least, is certain: that in 1597 when an ambassador from Poland was unexpectedly insolent in his oration, the Queen dumbfounded him by replying on the spot with as excellent Latinity as spirit, whereas at Paris once, when a Latin oration was expected from another ambassador, not only could not the King reply, but not even any one at court. With Montaigne the case was certainly different, but then his father had had him taught Latin before French, and consequently, on his travels, so soon as he reached a stopping-place, he introduced himself to the local priest, and though neither knew the other's native language, they passed their evening conversing without difficulty.
Very many were the interesting interviews that many a tourist had which he owed to a knowledge of Latin; the extent to which knowledge was acquired orally having led to its being an ordinary incident in the life of the tourist to pay a call on the learned man of the district; a duty with the Average Tourist, a pleasure for the others. And Latin was the invariable medium, part of the respectability of the occasion. At least, not quite invariable: when the historian De Thou visited the great Sigonius, they talked Italian, because the latter, in spite of a lifetime spent in becoming the chief authority on Roman Italy, spoke Latin with difficulty.
It seems curious that Latin should have been less generally understood south, than north, of the Alps, but such was the fact. Italy was, however, ahead of Spain, where even an acquaintance with Latin was rare. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century Navagero found Alcalá the only university where lectures were delivered in Latin, and, according to the best of the guide-book writers on Spain, Zeiler, the doctorate at Salamanca could be obtained, early in the seventeenth century, without any knowledge of Latin at all; while it has been shown by M. Cirot, the biographer of Mariana, that the latter's great history of Spain, published in Latin at this time, and as successful as a book of the kind ever is in its own day, was unsaleable until translated into Spanish.
Among those, too, who did know Latin there was the barrier of differing pronunciation. Lauder of Fountainhall was very much at sea to begin with, in spite of his Scotch pronunciation being much nearer to the French than an Englishman's would have been, and there is an anecdote in Vicente Espinel's "Marcos de Obregon" which is to the point here. The latter is a novel, it is true, but the tradition that it is semi-autobiographical is borne out by many of its tales reading as if they were actual experiences, of which the following is one. One day, the hero, a Spaniard, found himself in a boat on the river Po, with a German, an Italian, and a Frenchman, and to pass the time they tried to talk Latin so that all could understand each one; but they soon abandoned the plan, as the pronunciations varied too greatly.
Nevertheless, the passing of Latin out of European conversation is to be attributed rather to the growth of Italian, and later of French, as international tongues. Gaspar Ens, who wrote a series of guides to nearly every part of Europe, says in his preface to the volume on France, "At this day their language is so much used in almost every part of the world that whosoever is unskilled therein is deemed a yokel." This was in 1609, at which date, or soon after, it was as true as a general statement can be expected to be; just as much so as the assertion in the preface to an English book in 1578: "Once every one knew Latin ... now the Italian is as widely spread."[19]
It was only in the north that French came to rival Italian during this period, for the "lingua franca," also known as "franco piccolo," the hybrid tongue in which commerce was conducted along the shores of the Mediterranean, was so largely Italian that to the average Britisher, from whom Hakluyt drew his narratives, the two were indistinguishable; but an Italian would notice, as Della Valle did, that no form of a verb but the infinitive was used. If any one was met who knew more than two languages, he would oftenest be a Jew, who usually knew Spanish and Portuguese; the latter because the tribe of Judah, from which their deliverer was to come, was supposed to be domiciled in Portugal.
Another hybrid language, as well established in its own area as the "lingua franca," was Scot-French, so constantly in use as to have an existence as a literary dialect as well as in French burlesque. These mixed languages have no place in the ordinary book-guide to languages, but were left to personal tuition; yet in the lists of the most common phrases which Andrew Boorde appends to each of his descriptions of countries may be noted a curious instance from this borderland of philology. In both the Italian and the Spanish lists he renders "How do you fare?" by "Quo modo stat cum vostro corps?"