In speaking of relics, the secular ones must be remembered, too: foremost among them the original Ephesus statue of Diana, which Hentzner saw at Fontainebleau and Evelyn at the Louvre. Most frequently mentioned is the buck's head at Amboise. It bore antlers of enormous size, and for that reason had enjoyed Francis I's special protection while alive. By Sir John Reresby's time (1654) it had been ascertained that the buck was of English birth, having reached France by swimming the Channel; while thirty-three years later it had been dead for three hundred years and at the date of its death was nine hundred years old. These details need no explanation; any caretaker can equal them under pressure. The writer once asked the sextoness of the church where Spinoza lies buried how he came to be laid there considering he was not exactly orthodox: the answer was, without hesitation, that he became a Protestant before he died!
These secular relics cannot possibly be left without a digression concerning unicorn's horns, which were more prized than any other kind of exhibit. St. Mark's Treasury at Venice seems to have been the only museum that possessed more than one; it contained three. Dresden owned one, which hung by a golden chain; that at Fontainebleau, three yards high, was valued at one hundred thousand crowns. It was, however, a wise unicorn that knew its own horn: the Danish sailors kept their secrets quiet and prices high, the more easily since, owing to disasters, there were temporary cessations in the Greenland whale-fishery, of which unicorns' horns were a by-product, thus rendering the supply small and fluctuating. It was an open secret by this time that sea-unicorns existed, but the heraldic animal had the overwhelming advantage of support from Pliny, Aristotle, and the Bible and therefore fought for the "crowns" so to speak, with every success. It was not till this time, in 1603, that the unicorn was introduced into the arms of the King of England; and its horn was in the greater request because of its supposed quality of an antidote to poison. To the lore of this part of the subject Zinzerling makes an addition. At Tours lived a lawyer who had travelled in Spain and India, and had brought back three great rarities: "Rolandi gladium, Librum in pergameno Geographiæ et Hydrographiæ, membrum masculum Monocerotis majoris contra toxica efficaciæ quam cornu."
He did not see these personally, but mentions them because it would be a pity for any one to miss them for lack of a word or two from him. For himself, he could not find the lawyer, a kind of trouble from which these tourists ordinarily suffered, for it was part of their experience to make acquaintance with private collections. Not that there were any public ones to the extent we are accustomed to, except the churches, which, as picture galleries, had this advantage, that the pictures were seen in the setting for which they were designed. Practically all the official "treasuries" were only public to the extent that a remarkable country house like Compton Winyates is so now; yet on the other hand, and for that very reason, it was somewhat more customary for private collections to be accessible to strangers than is the case, probably, at present. What attracted the greatest number of visitors, however, was water-mechanisms.
Up till the beginning of the seventeenth century these were found at their best only in Italy; and of the Italian, those at Pratolino ranked first, belonging to the Duke of Florence, who was reputed to spend more on his water than on his wine. The invariable custom of secret devices for soaking the visitor as he sat down or walked about was there carried further, and with greater variety, than elsewhere. Besides, there was Fame blowing a trumpet; a peasant offering a drink to a tiger who swallows it and then looks all round; Syrinx beckons to Pan to pipe, whereupon Pan gets up from his seat, puts it aside, pipes, pulls his seat towards him and sits down again with a melancholy look because Syrinx has not rewarded him with a kiss. And so on, with a multitude of devices for making music and attracting attention, only equalled by those at the Villa d' Este at Tivoli.
It is noteworthy how long it took to introduce them into France, where everything Italian was fashionable. Marguerite de Valois speaks of those she saw in Flanders in 1577 in a way that implies no previous acquaintance with anything of the kind, but when peace was restored, we find St. Germain-en-Laye stocked with a poet who plays on a lyre, and with various animals which gather round him, and trees which bend down, as he plays; and the king passes by with his suite. On the other side of the Rhine ingenuity seems to have been devoted rather to clock-work. The clock at Strassburg, one of the chief marvels of Europe, was outdone by one in a private house at Augsburg: for besides displaying all the clever puerilities which the seventeenth century rejoiced in, it reproduced the movements and stations of the planets and the advent and effect of eclipses, all in their due time. Somewhat later, at Lübeck, the striking of the hour by the town clock was accompanied by the Virgin kissing her Baby, and St. Peter dropping his key and picking it up again, while at Hamburg could be seen a marvellous Annunciation, with a most gorgeous Gabriel and five attendant cherubim who flapped gilded wings, and a Blessed Virgin dressed in the French fashion who was discovered reading a book and ended by dropping a curtsey.
Of amusements which required people to take part in them, card games were rarely seen in Germany, and in Italy were banned as much by public opinion as by law, whereas in England they were an occupation rather than an amusement. So also with hawking and hunting. In six years abroad Moryson saw hawking but twice, once in Bohemia and once in Poland, and implies that in England it was common; while of hunting he definitely says, "England lacks not Actæons, eaten up by their own dogs." The same contrast he observes with regard to itinerant musicians and plays, of which latter he is sure that more are performed in London than in all the other parts of the world that he had visited put together. A variety of angling, on the other hand, he notes as peculiar to Italy: that with bait and hooks fastened to corks and held out of window for birds; while golf was only played in Scotland, Holland, and Naples; and the most frequently played game in Europe, pallone, was as unknown in Britain then as now. The piazza S. Stefano at Venice was reserved for pallone every Sunday evening, and in the disused papal palace at Avignon one room was given up to pallone and another to tennis, which came next in popularity, the chief centre being Paris. In 1577 it was credited with 1800 courts, but the Dutch ambassador resident there eighty years later had them counted and only discovered 118.
And so the list might go on and on and on—in all its seeming irrelevancy! And yet, when it is borne in mind that every detail is one that some tourist or other noticed, to the point of thinking it worth recording, a certain, at least symbolic, relevancy comes into view, even though it be nothing more vital than that of a 16th-century variety of subjective imbecility under the stimulus of a jog-trot. On the other hand, all this comes under the heading of
... things