To show how little of the braggart was in him it may be noted that when he visited the church of S. Lorenzo at Florence he did not refrain from naming, amongst the other sights he saw there, the French banners captured from Marshal Strozzi’s forces by the Florentines, and when on his way home he passed by Fornovo, the scene of the great French victory in 1495, does not allude to the battle at all. On the other hand, he expressly records that he turned aside from the road between Pavia and Milan to view the field of the battle so disastrous to the arms of France. The bent of Montaigne’s mind led him to devote his chief attention to the rules and institutions which regulated public life in the lands he visited, rather than to what modern travellers call “sights,” and in Fynes Moryson’s travels about ten, and in Coryat’s about thirty years later, the same tendencies appear. When at any time he does describe any human achievement, it is usually some mechanical device, such as the watch-tower and the water-works at Augsburg. Italy was rich, or probably much richer, in paintings than she is now, but only on three or four occasions does he find any worth mentioning. Nevertheless he writes pages in praise of the ridiculous squirts and tubes which are devised to drench the unwary visitors to Italian gardens now, just as they did at the time when he was on his travels. Artificial water-works of all sorts seem to have had a peculiar fascination for him: indeed on his way back to France he paid a second visit to Pratolino, near Florence, in order to compare the merits of the fountains there with those which he had seen at Tivoli. He ends the description of his expedition with the following thoroughly characteristic sentences: “Et essendo pregato dal casiero del palazzo di dire la mia sentenzia di quelle bellezze e di Tivoli, ne discorsi non comparando questi luoghi in generale, ma parte per parte, con le diverse considerazioni dell’un e dell’altro, essendo vicendevolmente vittore ora questo, or quello.”