English Travellers of the Renaissance Part 6

Robert, according to his autobiography, was well satisfied to go, but Francis, aged fifteen, had just been married to one of the Queen's Maids of Honour, aged fourteen, and after four days of revelry was in no mood to be thrust back into the estate of childhood.[338] High words pa.s.sed between him and his father on the occasion of his enforced departure for Paris. He was so agitated that he mislaid his sword and pistols--at least so we hear by the first letter Marcombes writes from Paris. "Mr Francis att his departure from London was so much troubled because of your Lords.h.i.+p's anger against him that he could never tell us where he put his sword and ye kaise of pistoles that your Lords.h.i.+p gave them, so that I have been forced to buy them here a kaise of pistolles a peece, because of the danger that is now everywhere in France, and because it is so much ye mode now for every gentleman of fas.h.i.+on to ride with a kase of Pistoles, that they Laugh att those that have them not. I bought also a Sword for mr francis and when Mr Robert saw it he did so earnestly desire me to buy him one, because his was out of fas.h.i.+on, that I could not refuse him that small request."[339]

Marcombes did not expose the boys long to the excitement of Paris, but at once hurried them to Geneva, and settled them to work, where Francis showed a great deal of resignation and good-humour in accepting his fate. He was not so sulky as Lord Cranborne, who in a similar situation fell ill, could not eat, and had to be taken back to England.[340] "And as for Mr francis," writes Marcombes to Cork, "I protest unto your Lords.h.i.+p that I did not thinke yt he could frame himselfe to every kind of good Learning with so great a facilitie and pa.s.sion as he doth, having tasted already a little drope of ye Libertinage of ye Court, but I find him soe disciplinable, and soe desirous to repare ye time Lost, yt I make no question but your Lords.h.i.+p shall receive a great ioye."[341] He had not had much of an education at Eton, as his governor takes pleasure in pointing out: "For Mr Francis I doe a.s.sure your Lords.h.i.+p he had need to aplay himselfe to other things till now, for except reeding and writting Inglish he was grounded in nothing of ye wordle (world); and beleeve me, for before G.o.d I spake true, when I say that never any gentleman hath donne lesse profit of his time then he had done when he went out of England: and besides yt if he had been Longer at Eatton he had Learned there to drinke with other deboice scholers, as I have beene in formed by Mr Robert."[342]

Won over by the study of "Fortifications," a branch of mathematics very pleasing to the seventeenth century boy, the future Viscount Shannon applied himself to work with energy;[343] and for a time peace reigned over the process of education. "Every morning," writes their tutor, "I teach them ye Rhetoricke in Latin, and I expound unto them Justin from Latin into french, and presently after dinner I doe reade unto them two chapters of ye old Testament with a brief exposition of those points that I think that they doe not understand; and before supper I teach them ye history of ye Romans in french out of florus and of t.i.tus Livius, and two sections of ye Cates.h.i.+sme of Caluin with ye most orthodox exposition of the points that they doe not understand; and after supper I doe reade unto them two chapters of ye new Testament, and both morning and evening we say our prayers together, and twice a weeke we goe to Church."[344]

The boys spoke French always, and had some dancing lessons, but no riding lessons, for "their lyms are not knitt and strong enough, nor their bodys hable to endure rough exercises; and besides, although wee have here as good and skillfull teachers as in many other places, yet when they shall come to paris or some other place, their teachers will make them beleeve that they have Lost their time and shall make them beginn againe: for it is their custome so to doe to all."[345] At tennis, however, Francis enjoyed himself, and grew apace. "I may a.s.sure your Lords.h.i.+p that both his Leggs and armes are by a third part bigger now then they were in England." Robert, even at fourteen a studious person, "doth not Love tennisse play so much, but delights himselfe more to be in private with some booke of history or other, but I perswade him often both to play att tennisse and goe about. I never saw him handsomer, for although he growes much, yet he is very fatt and his cheeks are as red as vermilian. This Leter end of ye winter is mighty cold and a great quant.i.ty of snow is fallen upon ye ground, but that brings them to such a stomacke that your Lords.h.i.+p should take a great pleasure to see them feed. I do not give them daintys, but I a.s.sure your Lords.h.i.+p that they have allwayes good bred and Good wine, good beef and mouton, thrice a week good capons and good fish, constantly two dishes of fruit and a Good piece of cheese; all kind of cleane linnen twice and thrice a week and a constant fire in their chamber wherein they have a good bed for them, and another for their men."[346]

Indeed, Marcombes was a very good governor, as Robert several times a.s.sured the Earl of Cork, and allowed them to lack for nothing. In the spring he bought them saddle-horses so that after their studies they might take the air and see their friends. Since a governor had charge of all the funds, it was a great test of his honesty whether he resisted the temptation to economize on the clothes and spending-money of his pupils, and to pocket the part of their allowance so saved. This is why Marcombes often lets fall into his letters to the Earl of Cork items such as these: "I have made a compleat black satin sute for Mr Robert: ye cloake Lined with plush, and I allow them every moneth a peese ye value of very neare two pounds sterlings for their pa.s.se time."[347]

The only disturbing elements in the satisfactory state of Marcombes and his pupils were the Killigrews. Thomas Killigrew, he who afterwards became one of the dramatists of the Restoration, had then only just outgrown the estate of page to Charles I., and in strolling about the Continent he paid the Boyles a visit.[348] As the brother of the wife whom Mr Francis had left at home, and on his own account as a fascinating courtier, he cast a powerful but baleful influence upon the household in Geneva. Marcombes was at first very guarded in his remarks, writing only that "Mr Kyligry is here since Sat.u.r.day Last ... but I think he will not Stay long: which perhaps will be ye better for yr sons: for although his conversation is very sweet and delectable yet they have no need of interruption, specially Mr francis, which was much abused in his Learning by his former teachers: and although he hath a great desire to redime ye time, yet he cannot follow his younger brother, and therefore he must have time, and avoid ye company of those yt care not for their bookes."[349] But when it appeared that Killigrew had told the Earl of Cork that Marcombes kept the brothers shabbily dressed, the governor unfolded his opinion of the rising dramatist as "one that speakes ill of his own mother and of all his friends and that plays ye foole allwayes through ye streets like a Schoole Boy, having Allwayes his mouth full of whoores and such discourses, and braging often of his getting mony from this or ye other merchant without any good intention to pay."[350] His company fomented in Mr Francis a boastful spirit, "never speaking of any thing but what he should doe when he should once more command his state, how many dogs he shoulde keepe; how many horses; how many fine bands, sutes and rubans, and how freely he would play and keepe Company with good fellowes, etc."[351]

Thomas Killigrew's sister, the wife of Mr Francis, was also a very disturbing person. She would correspond with her husband and urge him to run away from his tutor, and suggested coming to the Continent herself and meeting him.[352] These plots she made with the a.s.sistance of her brother, whom she much resembled in disposition.[353] There is no knowing what havoc she would have made with the carefully planned education of the Boyles, for Francis at the end of two years became dangerously restive, had not their tour been decisively ended by the first rumblings of the Civil War at home.

After a winter in Italy, they were about to start for Paris to perfect themselves in dancing and to begin riding the great horse, when they received news that the Earl of Cork was ruined by the rebellion in Ireland. He could send them no more money, he told them, than the two hundred and fifty pounds he had just dispatched. By economizing, and dismissing their servants, they might reach Holland, and enlist under the Prince of Orange. They must now work out their fortune for themselves.[354]

The two hundred and fifty pounds never came. They were embezzled by the agent; and the Boyles were left penniless in a strange country.

Marcombes did not desert them, however. Robert, who was too frail for soldiering, he kept with him in Geneva for two years. Francis, free at last, took horse, was off to Ireland, and joined in the fighting beside his brothers Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky, and Broghill, who rallied around their father.[355]

There are several other seventeenth-century books on the theory of travel besides La.s.sels', which would repay reading. But we have come to the period when essays of this sort contain so many repet.i.tions of one another, that detailed comment would be tedious. Edward Leigh's _Three Diatribes_[356] appeared in 1671, a year after La.s.sels' book, and in 1678 Gailhard, another professional governor, in his "Directions for the Education of youth as to their Breeding at Home and Travelling Abroad,"[357] imitated La.s.sels' attention to the particular needs of the country gentleman. "The honest country gentleman" is a synonym for one apt to be fooled, one who has neither wit nor experience. He, above all others, needs to go abroad to study the tempers of men and learn their several fas.h.i.+ons. "As to Country breeding, which is opposed to the Courts, to the Cities, or to Travelling: when it is merely such, it is a clownish one. Before a Gentleman comes to a settlement, Hawking, Coursing and Hunting, are the dainties of it; then taking Tobacco, and going to the Alehouse and Tavern, where matches are made for Races, c.o.c.k-fighting, and the like." As opposed to this life, Gailhard holds up the pattern of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, who did "strive after being bettered with an Outlandish Breeding" by means of close application to the French and Italian languages, to fencing, dancing, riding The Great Horse, drawing landscapes, and learning the guitar. "His Moneys he did not trifle away, but bestowed them upon good Books, Medals and other useful Rareties worth the Curiosity of a Compleat Gentleman."[358]

On comparing these instructions with those of the sixteenth century, one is struck with the emphasis they lay upon drawing and "limning." This is what we would expect in the seventeenth century, when an interest in pictures, statues, and architecture was a distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of a gentleman. The Marquis de Seignelay, sent on a tour in 1617 by his father Colbert, was accompanied by a painter and an architect charged to make him understand the beauties of Italian art.[359] Antoine Delahaute, making the Grand Tour with an Abbe for a governor, carried with him an artist as well, so that when he came upon a fine site, he ordered the chaise to be stopped, and the view to be drawn by the obedient draughtsman.[360] Not only did gentlemen study to appreciate pictures, but they strove themselves to draw and paint. In the travels of George Sandys[361] (edition 1615), may be seen a woodcut of travellers, in the costume of Henry of Navarre, sketching at the side of Lake Avernus. To take out one's memorandum-book and make a sketch of a charming prospect, was the usual thing before the camera was invented. "Before I went to bed I took a landscape of this pleasant terrace," says Evelyn in Roane.[362] At Tournon, where he saw a very strong castle under a high precipice, "The prospect was so tempting that I could not forbear designing it with my crayon."[363] Consequently, we find instructions for travellers reflecting the tastes of the time: Gerbier's _Subsidium Peregrinantibus_, for instance, insisting on a knowledge of "Perspective, Sculpture, Architecture and Pictures," as among the requisites of a polite education, lays great stress on the identification and survey of works of art as one of the main duties of a traveller.[364]

Significant as are the instructions of Gerbier, La.s.sels, and others of this period, there are some directions for an education abroad which are more interesting than these products of professional tutors--instructions written by one who was himself the perfect gentleman of his day. The Earl of Chesterfield's letters to his son define the purpose of a foreign education with a freedom which is lacking in the book of a governor who writes for the public eye. Though the contents of the letters are familiar to everyone, their connection with travel for "cultum animi" has. .h.i.therto, I think, been overlooked.

It will be remembered that the earl sent his son abroad at the age of fourteen to study for five years on the Continent, and to acquire a better preparation for life than Oxford or Cambridge could offer. Of these universities Chesterfield had a low opinion. He could not sufficiently scorn an education which did not prevent a man from being flurried at his Presentation to the King. He remembered that he himself, when he was first introduced into good company, with all the awkwardness and rust of Cambridge about him, was frightened out of his wits. At Cambridge he "had acquired among the pedants of an illiberal seminary a turn for satire and contempt, and a strong tendency to argumentation and contradiction," which was a hindrance to his progress in the polite world. Only after a continental education did he see the follies of Englishmen who knew nothing of modern Europe, who were always talking of the Ancients as something more than men, and of the Moderns as something less. "They are never without a cla.s.sic or two in their pockets; they stick to the old good sense; they read none of modern trash; and will show you plainly that no improvement has been made, in any one art or science, these last seventeen hundred years."[365]

His son, therefore, was to waste no time in the society of pedants, but accompanied by a travelling tutor, was to begin studying life first-hand at the Courts. His book-learning was to go side by side with the study of manners:

"Courts and Camps are the only places to learn the world in. There alone all kinds of characters resort, and human nature is seen in all the various shapes and modes ... whereas, in all other places, one local mode generally prevails."[366]

Moreover, the earl did not think that a company wholly composed of men of learning could be called good company. "They cannot have the easy manners and tournure of the world, as they do not live in it." And an engaging address, "an insinuating behaviour," was to be sought for early in life, and, at the same time, with the solid parts of learning. "The Scholar, without good breeding, is a Pedant: the Philosopher, a Cynic: the Soldier, a Brute: and every man disagreeable."[367]

The five years of young Stanhope's travel were carefully distributed as follows: a year in Lausanne,[368] for the rudiments of languages; a year in Leipsic, for a thorough grounding in history and jurisprudence; a year spent in visits to such cities as Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna, for a view of the different Courts; one in Italy, to get rid of the manners of Germany; and one in Paris, to give him the final polish, the supreme touch, of gentlemanly complaisance, politeness, and ease.

We may pa.s.s over the years in Germany, as the earl did, without much comment. Young Stanhope was quite satisfactory in the more solid parts of learning, and it was not until he reached Italy, there to begin his courtly training, that Chesterfield's interest was fully aroused.

"The manners of Leipsig must be shook off," he says emphatically. "No scramblings at your meals as at a German ordinary: no awkward overturns of gla.s.ses, plates, and salt-cellers."[369]

He is to mind the decent mirth of the courtiers--their discreet frankness, their natural, careless, but genteel air; in short, to acquire the Graces. Chesterfield sent letters of introduction to the best company in Venice, forwarded his own diamond shoe buckles for his son, and began to pour forth advice on the possible social problems confronting a young Englishman in Rome. With a contemptuous tolerance for Papists, Protestants, and all religious quarrels as obstructions to the art of pleasing, he bade Stanhope be civil to the Pope, and to kneel down while the Host was being carried through the streets. His tutor, though, had better not. With wonderful artistic insight, the earl perceives that the fitting att.i.tude for Mr Harte is simple, ungracious honesty.[370]

On the subject of the Pretender, then resident in Rome, his advice is; never meet a Stuart at all if you can help it; but if you must, feign ignorance of him and his grievances. If he begins to talk politics, disavow any knowledge of events in England, and escape as soon as you can.[371]

Long before his son's year in Italy was completed, Chesterfield began preparing him for Paris. For the first six months Stanhope was to live in an academy with young Frenchmen of fas.h.i.+on; after that, to have lodgings of his own. The mornings were to belong to study, or serious conversation with men of learning or figure; the afternoons, to exercise; the evenings to be free for b.a.l.l.s, the opera, or play. These are the pleasures of a gentleman, for which his father is willing to pay generously. But he will not, he points out frequently, subscribe to the extravagance of a rake. The eighteen-year-old Stanhope is to have his coach, his two valets and a footman, the very best French clothes--in fact, everything that is sensible. But he shall not be allowed money for dozens of cane-heads, or fancy snuff-boxes, or excessive gaming, or the support of opera-singers. One handsome snuff-box, one handsome sword, and gaming only when the presence of the ladies keeps down high stakes; but no tavern-suppers--no low company which costs so much more than dissipations among one's equals. There is no need for a young man of any address to make love to his laundress,[372] as long as ladies of his own cla.s.s stoop to folly.

Above all, Stanhope is not to a.s.sociate with his own countrymen in Paris. On them Chesterfield is never tired of pouring the vials of scorn. He began while Stanhope was at Leipsic to point out the deficiences of English boys:

"They are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster, and the Fellows of their college. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin; but not one word of modern history, or modern languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad as they call it; but in truth, they stay at home all that while; for being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good, but dine and sup with one another only, at the tavern.[373]...

"The life of les Milords Anglais is regularly, or if you will, irregularly, this. As soon as they rise, which is very late, they breakfast together to the utter loss of two good morning hours. Then they go by coachfuls to the Palais, the Invalides, and Notre-Dame; from thence to the English coffee-house where they make up their tavern party for dinner. From dinner, where they drink quick, they adjourn in cl.u.s.ters to the play, where they crowd up the stage, drest up in very fine clothes, very ill made by a Scotch or Irish tailor. From the play to the tavern again, where they get very drunk, and where they either quarrel among themselves, or sally forth, commit some riot in the streets, and are taken up by the watch."[374]

To avoid these monsters, and to cultivate the best French society, was what a wise young man must do in Paris. He must establish an intimacy with the best French families. If he became fas.h.i.+onable among the French, he would be fas.h.i.+onable in London.

Chesterfield considered it best to show no erudition at Paris before the rather illiterate society there. As the young men were all bred for and put into the army at the age of twelve or thirteen, only the women had any knowledge of letters. Stanhope would find at the academy a number of young fellows ignorant of books, and at that age hasty and petulant, so that the avoidance of quarrels must be a young Englishman's great care.

He will be as lively as these French boys, but a little wiser; he will not reproach them with their ignorance, nor allow their idlenesses to break in on the hours he has laid aside for study.

Such was the plan of a Grand Tour laid down by one of the first gentlemen of Europe. It remains one of the best expressions of the social influence of France upon England, and for that reason properly belongs to the seventeenth century more than to the Georgian era in which the letters were written. Chesterfield might be called the last of the courtiers. He believed in accomplishments and personal elegance as a means of advancing oneself in the world, long after the Court had ceased to care for such qualities, or to be of much account in the destinies of leading Englishmen. Republicanism was in the air. Chesterfield was thinking of the France of his youth; but France had changed. In 1765, Horace Walpole was depressed by the solemnity and austerity of French society. Their style of conversation was serious, pedantic, and seldom animated except by a dispute on some philosophic subject.[375] In fact, Chesterfield was admiring the France of Louis the Fourteenth long after "Le Soleil" had set, and the country was sombre. It was the eve of the day when France was to imitate the democratic ideals of England.

England, at last, instead of being on the outskirts of civilization, was coming to be the most powerful, respected, and enlightened country in Europe. When that day dawned, Englishmen no longer sought the Continent in the spirit of the Elizabethans--the spirit which aimed at being "A citizen of the whole world."

CHAPTER VII

THE DECADENCE OF THE GRAND TOUR.

During the several generations when the Stuarts communicated their love of France to the aristocracy of England, there was, as we might suppose, a steady undercurrent of protest against this Gallic influence. A returning traveller would be pursued by the rabble of London, who, sighting his French periwig and foreign gestures, would pelt his coach with gutter-dirt, squibs, roots and rams-horns, and run after it shouting "French Dogs! French Dogs! A Mounser! A Mounser!"[376] Between the courtiers and the true-born Englishman there was no great sympathy in the matter of foreign culture. The courtiers too often took towards deep-seated English customs the irreverent att.i.tude of their master, Charles II.--known to remark that it was the roast beef and reading of the holy Scriptures that caused the noted sadness of the English.[377]

The true-born Englishman retorted with many a jibe at the "gay, giddy, brisk, insipid fool," who thought of nothing but clothes and garnitures, despised roast beef, and called his old friends ruffians and rustics; or at the rake who "has not been come from France above three months and here he has debauch'd four women and fought five duels." The playwrights could always secure an audience by a skilful portrait of an "English Mounsieur" such as Sir Fopling Flutter, who "went to Paris a plain bashful English Blockhead and returned a fine undertaking French Fop."[378]

There had always been a protest against foreign influence, but in the eighteenth century one cannot fail to notice a stronger and more contemptuous att.i.tude than ever before. England was feeling her power.

War with France sharpened the shafts of satire, and every victory over the French increased a strong insular patriotism in all cla.s.ses. Foote declared residence in Paris a necessary part of every man of fas.h.i.+on's education, because it "Gives 'em a relish for their own domestic happiness and a proper veneration for their own national liberties."[379] His Epilogue to _The Englishman in Paris_ commends the prudence of British forefathers who

"Scorned to truck for base unmanly arts, Their native plainness and their honest hearts."[380]

It was not the populace alone, or those who appealed directly to the populace, who sneered at Popish countries, and pitied them for not being British.[381] As time went on Whigs of all cla.s.ses boasted of the superiority of England, especially when they travelled in Europe.

"We envy not the warmer clime that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies ...

'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's Isle And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile."[382]

Addison's travels are full of reflections of this sort. The dest.i.tution of the Campagna of Rome demonstrates triumphantly what an aversion mankind has to arbitrary government, while the well-populated mountain of St Marino shows what a natural love they have for liberty. Whigs abroad were well caricatured by Smollett in _Peregrine Pickle_ in the figures of the Painter and the Doctor. They observed that even the horses and dogs in France were starved; whereupon the Governor of Peregrine, an Oxonian and a Jacobite, sneered that they talked like true Englishmen. The Doctor, affronted by the insinuation, told him with some warmth that he was wrong in his conjecture, "his affections and ideas being confined to no particular country; for he considered himself as a citizen of the world. He owned himself more attached to England than to any other kingdom, but this preference was the effect of reflection and not of prejudice."

This growing conviction of England's superiority helped to bring about the decadence of travel for education. Travel continued, and the eighteenth century was as noticeable as any other for the "mal du pays"

which attacked young men, but travel became the tour of curiosity and diversion with which we are familiar, and not an earnest endeavour to become "a compleat person." Many changes helped this decadence. The "policy" of Italy and France, which once attracted the embryo statesmen of Elizabeth, was now well known and needed no further study. With the pa.s.sing of the Stuarts, when the king's favour ceased to be the means of making one's fortune, a courtly education was no longer profitable. High offices under the Georges were as often as not filled by unpolished Englishmen extolled for their native flavour of bluntness and bluffness.

Foreign graces were a superfluous ornament, more or less ridiculous. The majority of Englishmen were wont to prize, as Sam Johnson did, "their rustic grandeur and their surly grace," and to join in his lament:

"Lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warrior dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety refined away, Of France the mimick and of Spain the prey."[383]

A large section of society was inimical to the kind of education that the Earl of Chesterfield prescribed for his son. The earl was well aware of it, indeed, and marked with repugnance divers young bucks of his day with leathern breeches and unpowdered hair, who would exclaim; "d.a.m.n these finical outlandish airs, give me a manly resolute manner. They make a rout with their graces, and talk like a parcel of dancing masters, and dress like a parcel of fops; one good Englishman will beat three of them."[384]

Even during the height of the Grand Tour in the latter half of the seventeenth century, thoughtful minds, observing the effects of a foreign education as seen not only in the courtiers of Charles II., but in the dozens of obscure country gentlemen who painfully sought to acquire the habit of a Parisian Marquis by education abroad, noticed the weak points of such a system. The Earl of Clarendon thought it pernicious to send boys abroad until after they had gone through Oxford or Cambridge. There was no necessity for their getting the French accent at an early age, "as if we had no mind to be suspected to be Englishmen." That took them from their own country at just the age when they ought to have severe mental discipline, for the lack of which no amount of social training would make them competent men. "They return from travel with a wonderful confidence which may very well be called impudence ... all their learning is in wearing their clothes well; they have very much without their heads, very little within; and they are very much more solicitous that their periwigs fit handsomely, than to speak discreetly; they laugh at what they do not understand, which understanding so little, makes their laughter very immoderate. When they have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities which they brought over with them, fresh travellers arrive with newer fas.h.i.+ons, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen."[385]

When these products of a French education could not remain in town, but were obliged to live on their estates amid rough country squires, it went hard with them. "They will by no means embrace our way," says The Country Gentleman in Clarendon's _Dialogue of the Want of Respect Due to Age_, "but receive us with cringes and treat us with set speeches, and complain how much it rains, that they cannot keep their hair dry, or their linnen handsome one hour. They talk how much a better country France is and how much they eat and drink better there, which our neighbors will not believe, and laugh at them for saying so. They by no means endure our exercises of hunting and hawking, nor indeed can their tender bodies endure those violent motions. They have a guitar or some other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their beds before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them, to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire. In a word, they live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know whether they eat and drink or no."[386]

Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation with local government, which was the chief duty of the country gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had learned little of the laws and customs of their own country. Clarendon draws a sad picture of the return of the native who was ashamed to be present at the public and private meetings for the administration of justice, because he had spent in dancing the time when he might have been storing knowledge, and who now pa.s.sed his days a-bed, reading French romances of which he was tired.

Locke also set forth the fallacies of the Grand Tour in his _Essay of Education_. He admitted that fencing and riding the Great Horse were looked upon as "so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought a great omission to neglect them," but he questioned whether riding the Great Horse was "of moment enough to be made a business of."[387]