Paul Rycaut.
Paul Rycaut, secretary to the English ambassador at Constantinople, and author of an exceedingly valuable account of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), should perhaps hardly be reckoned among travellers, as he gives no account of his residence, and merely condenses the results of his observation of Ottoman manners and polity. The book must have been highly important at a time when the Ottoman still menaced Europe, and may be read with pleasure even now for its good sense and varied information, which includes a lively description of a palace revolution, and an account of the chief religious sects among the Turks.
Edward Browne.
Doctor Edward Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, was a highly accomplished man, whose travels in Eastern Europe (1673) contain a remarkable amount of accurate observation within a surprisingly narrow compass. It seems strange to find him foretelling a great territorial expansion of the Turkish empire at the expense of Christian Europe, but the prophecy came near being fulfilled by the peril of Vienna not long after Browne wrote.
Foreign Travellers in England.
This review of English travellers would not be complete without a brief notice of two foreign visitors to the country, whose narratives, translated into English, have probably been more read here than at home, and from whom much valuable information may be derived. Sorbière, a philosopher of Gassendi’s school, a Protestant by birth, but who had become a nominal Catholic, visited England in 1663. Being, as he admits, entirely ignorant of the language, his attention was principally given to the intellectual aspects of the country, which were not unfamiliar to him, from his acquaintance with the works of Englishmen who had written in Latin. His accounts of Oxford and the Royal Society are neither unamusing nor uninstructive; he has a true veneration for English men of science, especially Bacon, whom he pronounces ‘the greatest man for the interest of natural philosophy that ever was.’ Of English letters he can only say that ‘he understands that all English eloquence consists in mere pedantry.’ Writing in the character of a courtier, Sorbière expresses himself antagonistically to the English constitution, but it is difficult to believe that his remarks are not sometimes ironical. He can hardly have thought it a very extravagant idea on the part of the commons ‘that their king ought to apply himself entirely to maintain the public peace, to promote the happiness of his people, and to advance the honour and reputation of his country abroad, as much as possibly he can.’ We are nevertheless informed that this and similar views arise from ‘a particular inclination they have by nature to supply themselves with such disrespectful arguments.’
The travels in England of Duke Cosmo de’ Medici, heir-apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were performed in 1669, and described by Signor Magalotti, a member of his suite, whose manuscript account was translated into English, and published in 1821. They are more interesting than most foreign narratives of English travel, in so far as Cosmo, having landed at Plymouth and travelled up to London, and having afterwards made excursions to Oxford, Cambridge, and other places, saw more of English country life than usual, and inasmuch as they are accompanied by excellent sketches taken by artists in his suite. It is most delightful to be thus enabled to see towns and villages and country-houses exactly as they appeared in the days of Charles II., and it is only to be regretted that the artists did not exercise their pencils upon the streets of London. Magalotti is an intelligent and inquisitive traveller; but, voyaging in the train of a prince, and unacquainted with the language, he can tell us little respecting the people. His account of what fell within his sphere is sensible and impartial, with a few errors, such as the strange assertion that Clarendon had been secretly a Presbyterian! He is too much of a courtier to inform us respecting the court of Charles II., except in the enumeration of titled persons and officials, in which he is very exact. He gives a fair account of the Royal Society, and of the theatre; but seems unconscious of the existence of English literature outside the walls of the playhouse.
We have now accompanied the literature of the Restoration period from its apparently sudden manifestation contemporaneously with the return of the exiled monarch to its transition into what is so appropriately in one point of view, so unaptly in another, termed England’s Augustan age. We have seen that this apparent abruptness was deceptive, arising from the interruption of English literary development by the Civil War and its consequences; and that the Restoration literature represented tendencies which must inevitably have prevailed without the infusion of any French element. The old Elizabethan mode had become inadequate to the vastly extended needs of the time, and we are now able to recognize the literature of the Restoration in its proper connection as a transition to the thoroughly practical and business-like style of the eighteenth century, which, having worked itself out in its turn, and arrived at an impracticable position through the total negation of imagination by its most characteristic representatives,[15] brought about the revival of the Elizabethan spirit in the imaginative, spiritual, and at the same time intensely human literature of the nineteenth century. This in turn seems threatened with decay from the exaggeration of its characteristic qualities; and the antidote might be sought in less hopeful quarters than in the sound sense, manly vigour, and solid execution of the robust if prosaic writers of the Age of Dryden.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Fox thought that Shakespeare’s reputation would have stood higher if he had never written Hamlet!