But for the man who is trying to avoid work, the third of the mediæval types, the vagabond, it would be out of place to select an individual to stand for the class in Renascence days, seeing that it became a stock literary type; vagabondage in general being epitomized for the time in the Spanish picaro. The picaro was one who saw much of the seamy side of life and remembered it with pleasure—it was all life and the true picaro was in love with life. The only enemy he had permanently was civilisation; yet he and it became reconciled in his old age: a picaro who grew old ceased to be a picaro. Meanwhile he was always forgiving civilisation, and being forgiven; both had equal need of forgiveness. Yet there is one picaro characteristic hard to overlook—his passion for being dull at great length when he drops into print: Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Bias being the only ones of whom it may be said that from a reader's standpoint they were all that they should have been and nothing that they should not. The rest, when met between the covers of a book, resemble the parson whom one of themselves, Quevedo's Pablos, caught up on the way to Madrid and whom he hardly prevented from reciting his verses on St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, fifty octavetts to each virgin; even then he could not escape a comedy containing more scenes than there were days in a Jerusalem pilgrimage, besides five quires concerning Noah's Ark. This same Pablos explains incidentally what his kind talked about to chance companions on the road, for meeting another making for Segovia they fell into "la conversacion propia de picaros." Whether the Turk was on the downhill and how strong was the king: how the Holy Land might be reconquered, and likewise Algiers: party politics were then discussed and afterwards the management of the rebellious Low Countries. There were, too, picaros of high degree, but these were all men of war, whereas nothing but hunger made an ordinary picaro fight. High and low, however, had this in common, that they preferred living at others' expense to working, and consequently shifted their lodgings as often as any other class of tourist, in deference to local opinion.
Of the fourth mediæval type, the knight-errant, it is hard to say whether it was extinct or not: all depends on the extent to which the knight-errant is idealised. It is certainly true in this degree, that contemporary fiction must be reckoned as a cause of travel. Don Quixote is not to be ignored as a traveller and he was not alone. The first Earl of Cork's eldest son was so affected by the romances that the "roving wildness of his thoughts" which they brought about was only partially cured by continual extraction of square and cube roots. But perhaps the knight-errant of this date is better identified with the picaro of high degree, and as such the class may be exemplified by Don Alonzo de Guzman, the first chapter of whose autobiography gives a better insight into the psychology, and life on the road, of the picaro than the whole flood of nineteenth-century comment on the subject. At the age of eighteen he found himself with no father, no money, and a mother pious but talkative; after having provided for his needs for a while by marriage, he left home with a horse, a mule, a bed, and sixty ducats. And though what follows belongs more to the history of lying than the history of the world, it throws side-lights. And at any rate, any excuse is good enough to turn to it, for Don Alonzo has much in common with Benvenuto Cellini.
THE CHEAPEST WAY
Now we have passed beyond the mediæval types and come to such as are somewhat more prominent in this, than in the previous, centuries. Exiles, for instance. The economic changes that took place during the sixteenth century made it increasingly difficult for the equivalents for Chancellors of the Exchequer to meet the yearly deficits. The legal authorities were therefore called upon to assist, and a working arrangement was established in practically all European countries whereby the political ferment of the time was taken advantage of for the betterment of the finances. Instead of the slow process and meagre results of waiting for death-duties, a man of wealth suffered premature civil death, or was harried into civil suicide. He was exiled, or fled: he had become a tourist.
Inseparable from political is religious self-exile. What happened very often in England was this. A youngster is seized with that belief in the likelihood of an ideal life elsewhere and that desire for a change, which are characteristic of the age of twenty. The theological cast of the age gives the former a religious bias. He escapes. After a time it seems to him that human characteristics have the upper hand of the apostolic, even in Roman Catholics, to a greater extent than he once believed, and that he would like to go home. He lands, is questioned by the Mayor, reported on to the Privy Council, in which report his experiences are to be found summarised.
One class of men, however, which might be expected to provide many examples, is for the most part absent,—missionaries,—occupied at home converting each other at this date, or re-converting themselves. The chief, in fact, the Jesuits, were confined each one to his nation by order, and only in respect of their early training days do they appear as foreigners abroad. Acknowledgements are due, on the other hand, for information received, to captives set free, soldiers, artists, herbalists, antiquaries, and even to those who, so far as we know, only looked on, like Shakespeare; and to many others led abroad by special reasons, such as the Italian Marquis who felt it necessary for him to have a long holiday after the privations of Lent.
But with all these varieties of tourist, we still have not come to the Average Tourist. The type is extinct, killed by reference-books, telegraphy, and democracy. For the Average Tourist left his fatherland to get information which he could not get at home, and he wanted this information because he was a junior member of the aristocracy, at that time the governing class more exclusively than at present. In feudal days isolation was, comparatively, taken for granted, and the fact of that voluntary isolation implied many hindrances to touring. The need of acquiring information of every kind that affected political action had been therefore less realised and the difficulty of acquiring it greater. These years near 1600 are the years of transition, transition to a custom for travellers to
... seek their place through storms,