And now, my Lord, with this preparation, I think myself enabled to reply distinctly to the several arguments you alleged for the expediency of foreign travel. It is very clear, that the most solid advantages are lost by it. But perhaps we shall find a recompense for this loss, in the shewy and ornamental accomplishments, which travel promises; and which your Lordship supposes the world will readily, and with reason, accept instead of them.
These accomplishments are summed up in the BENEFITS of an enlarged society and conversation; which, again, branch out into many heads; and under different names, furnished, I think, the substance, as well as governed the method, of your vindication.
This was the polite and popular theme, which you chose to dress out in all the colours of your eloquence. To make way for these, and to lay them on with more effect, your Lordship was pleased to tell us a very melancholy story. England, it seems, is over-run with barbarism and ignorance; its inhabitants are rude and uncivilized; and nothing can be learnt among them, which is fit to appear in good company.
If this had been said of our forefathers in Cæsar’s time, or even in good King Edgar’s, when the land, they say, was over-run with wolves (by which, I suppose, the monkish mythology means men, as savage); I could have found but little, it may be, to oppose to the accusation. But at this time of the day, when arts and letters have at least made some progress among us; when commerce has extended our acquaintance with the rudest parts of the globe, and policy strengthened our connexions with the most civilized; when our country is filled with large flourishing towns, and even prides itself in a vast, opulent, and splendid metropolis; I could not but think the charge was a little aggravated, or that your Lordship had forgotten to speak of England, as it now subsists, in the close of the seventeenth century. It seemed to me as if the English might now, at least, deserve to be considered as men; and that in our courts and camps, if not in our colleges, we might stand a chance of finding what your Lordship would not disdain to qualify with the name of gentlemen.
But the other representation was more favourable to your Lordship’s cause: and out of that representation arose the several Barbarities, with which you thought fit to mortify and alarm us.
The first fire of your zeal is spent on that swarm of Prejudices, with which our English, or at least provincial, youth are commonly over-run.
Prejudices, my Lord, is an equivocal term; and may as well mean right opinions taken upon trust, and deeply rooted in the mind, as false and absurd opinions, so derived and grown into it.
The former of these will do no hurt; on the contrary, perhaps, the very best part of education is employed in the culture of them.
But admit, they are of the latter sort: still they may be only the excesses of right principles and notions. And in that case, I should doubt whether the evil be of consequence enough to deserve your indignation. Perhaps no man has enough of certain virtues, that does not carry them something too far. The just degree, the precise mean, is a nice point to hit. The condition of our common nature is such, that we either overshoot the mark, or fall short of it; and your Lordship easily apprehends which is the more convenient as well as more generous part, in this moral archery.
Besides, reflexion and experience will come in, soon enough to moderate these excesses. So that, for my part, though our young patriot should happen to entertain the extravagant conceit, you diverted yourself with, of the soil and climate of Old England, I should take that for no great objection to his home-breeding, and should, possibly, not be over-forward to disabuse him of such honest errors.