CHAPTER VIII

TRAVELLING

IN the very opening of the century Stow plaintively remarked, 'Nowadays all the world goes upon wheels '— and this when hackney coaches were not yet introduced, and mail coaches were still a novelty! Truly in the matter of speed and cheapness, of ease and extent of locomotion, we have left our forefathers lagging far behind; yet in some of the essential elements of travel we are, after all, not so much the gainers. Certainly they did not go abroad every year, many of them but once in a lifetime; but then they took far longer over it, saw infinitely more, and found in foreign countries all those characteristic peculiarities which the railways and the universal bagman have gone far to obliterate. If they brought home wrought-iron from Nuremberg, goldsmith's work from Genoa, lace from Malines, glass from Venice, it was not to find the same patterns duplicated and reduplicated in the first London shop they entered when they got back, but to display to the admiring eyes of home-staying friends who had never beheld the like. They saw strange countries, each with its distinctive stamp of manners, customs, costumes; and in truth there was more of travel in its real sense in those days between London and Penzance than in these between London and Peru.

Yet if the traveller was more a foreigner in one sense, he was less so in another, for his letters of introduction made him free of the best society in whatever town he made any stay, and all the great universities with their

universal language of spoken Latin still made cultured Europe one. Nowadays the thing is reversed; the traveller with a Cook's circular ticket is sent express by rail to a selection of towns which he must get through in a month; he adheres to the railway since time presses, and sees little or nothing of his route. He goes the round of the stereotyped sights, puts up at hotels at which he eats the same food and is served in the same manner as at home, and talks to no one but other travelling English, for he is utterly an outsider; of the life of the people of his own class in France, Italy, Germany, Spain he sees no more than if he had never set foot out of England.

Our forefathers managed differently. A young man's education was not considered complete until he had gone abroad for year or two to see the world-a world which is not to be seen from the windows of railway carriages nor at the tables of anglicised hotels. If he were a poor scholar he contrived to get a year or so at some foreign university-Leyden, Padua, Bologna, or perhaps Paris-but in the case of a wealthy man his father gave him a handsome outfit, a servant, perhaps a travelling tutor, a couple of good horses or a coach in which to travel post, letters of credit to bankers in each town of importance where he planned to stay, and what was almost as essential, introductions to various people of good position who could give him the entry into good society. Thus equipped, his year of travel very quickly made a man of the world of one who had started a raw youth.

As to hardships, well, are they not of the very essence of travel? Where else does the spice of adventure come in? Is it not au fond the craving for hardness that nowdays sends the true traveller mountaineering?—a thing which the seventeenth century man seldom cared for, having his desires in this respect sufficiently sated with duels, highwaymen, coach accidents, and snowdrifts. After all, a series of these unpleasant mishaps would not

go far to outweigh the sweeping horror of a modern railway accident.

Even if we do not entirely endorse Ruskin's dictum that the dulness of travel is in exact proportion to its speed, since there is certainly an exhilaration in rapid motion, yet it is true enough that the traveller by train, tram, motor, or even bicycle, sees far less than the wayfarer who goes afoot, though he may cover ten times the extent of country. Even the swift phantasmagoria from the windows of a railway carriage, though it does not lack charm, rarely attracts the notice of the passenger who is always provided with his daily paper. For delight the two most ancient methods of travel, riding on horseback and sailing, have never been surpassed. That the former was appreciated in the days of which I speak, Mr. Peacham's description of a ride, quoted in the chapter on country pastimes, evidences, as well as many slight references scattered up and down the pages of letters and journals. The hardships of sailing vessels have been a good deal insisted on; certainly the accommodation was often very rough, the boats ill-found, and tiresome delay incurred in waiting for wind and tide; yet it is fair to remember that it was always disasters and delays that left a record; the brief entry, a good passage, may cover untold charm of moonlight upon summer seas, or of the joy of scudding before a fresh breeze with all sail set. Then, as now, it was the complaints that found utterance.

The fullest and most detailed account of continental travel towards the middle of the century is of course to be found in John Evelyn's Diary. He was the ideal traveller of the Baedeker type, noting down carefully all the regulation sights, churches, picture galleries, show places of all sorts; but he also had an eye for little characteristic touches, such as the 'goodly lime-planted quay or margent at Amsterdam, paved with clincars, a 'sunburnt white brick,' and such oddities as the wooden

frame like a churn, which a woman who had two husbands was condemned to wear. He spent many years perambulating foreign lands; not only did sight-seeing appeal to his refined and curious tastes, but he was thankful to absent himself for a time from his own country where the political troubles distressed him, while he felt in himself no power to meet or cope with them. To the royal cause he gave his sympathy and contributions in money, once for a very brief while his sword, but personal devotion, possibly courage, was lacking; so while sedition ripened to rebellion, and war stalked through the land, he roamed across the picture galleries and museums of France and Italy, picking up curiosities and treasures of art to adorn his home when peace should be restored, and filling his diary with interesting trifles, from the mass of which I glean a sample here and there.

He visits two of the celebrated printing presses. At Leyden he says: 'Here was the famous Dan. Heinsius, 'whom I so longed to see, as well as the Elzevirian printing-house and shop, renown'd for the politeness of 'the character and editions of what he has publish'd through Europe.' His mention of the fascinating Maison Plantin is even slighter. After an enthusiastic description of the many sights of Antwerp, he says: 'Returning by 'the shop of Plantin, I bought some books for the ' namesake only of that famous printer.'

It is curious to find the pension already in full swing at Amsterdam: 'I changed my lodgings out of a desire ' to converse among the Sectaries that swarm in this city. 'It was at a Brownist's house where we had an extra

'ordinary good table. There was in pension with us my 'L. Keeper Finch, and one Sir J. Fotherbee. Here I also found an English Carmelite with another Irish ' gentleman.'

Returning to England for a few months on business, while the battle of Edgehill was being fought, he was admiring the curiosities of Winchester, where he 'vissited

'the Castle, Schole, Church, and King Arthur's Round Table, but especially the Church, and its Saxon Kings' • Monuments which I esteemed a worthy antiquity.' Obtaining license to travel again, he crossed from Dover to Calais in the snow, and proceeded on horseback to Paris. Of all that excites his alert curiosity in that city time would fail to tell, but it is worthy of remark that in the Louvre it is the more recent painters who find most favour in his eyes, Veronese, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio; the pre-Raphaelites are unmentioned.

On his visit to Fontainebleau he passes through the forest, which left a most unpleasant impression on his mind: By the way we passed through a Forest so prodigiously encompassed with hideous rocks of whitish 'hard stone, heaped one on another in mountainous 'height, but I think the like is not to be found elsewhere. 'It abounds with staggs, wolves, boares, and not long ' after a lynx or ounce was killed among them which ' had devoured some passengers. On the summit of one ' of these gloomy precipices, intermingled with trees and 'shrubs, the stones hanging over, and menacing ruin, is 'built an hermitage. In these solitudes rogues frequently 'lurk and do mischiefe.' Nothing can be imagined in greater contrast to our ideas of the picturesque than the abhorrence of such men as Evelyn for 'horrid' woods, 'hideous' precipices, and the like, though possibly these epithets may have been used in a sense slightly different from ours, implying rather serried and jagged or awful and stupendous. In crossing the mountains between Siena and Rome he was wonderfully impressed by the sight Ruskin has so frequently described of looking down from above the clouds. As we ascended,' he says, 'we ' entered a very thick, solid, and dark body of cloudes ' which look'd like rocks at a little distance, which lasted near a mile in going up; they were dry misty vapours, 'hanging undissolv'd for a vast thicknesse, and obscuring 'both the sun and earth, so that we seemed to be in the