Two features, however, were almost invariably commended: Irish harping and Irish girls. And the latter were at no disadvantage among the foreigners, since even in the far west which Captain Cuellar visited, they spoke Latin fluently, although content with one garment, often with less. The only fault that could be found with them was that of growing older as years went on, for to see an old Irishwoman before breakfast was, says Moryson, enough to turn a man's stomach. The country, too, received unlimited praise, with one abatement here also: in respect of its wetness; greater then than now, it may be said with some certainty.[69] Lithgow, in particular, when he visited "this sequestrate and most auspicuous monarchy," in 1619, discovered there "more Rivers, Lakes, Brooks, Strands, Quagmires, Bogs, and Marshes than in all Christendom besides." In five months he ruined six horses and was himself more tired than any of them. Great, however, were the fetiches, and they prevailed. The essentials of life, as they appeared to the Irishman, and as they appeared to most Europeans, differed so utterly, and the reasons underlying the differences were so unrealisable to each other, that Ireland remained comparatively unvisited on account of its lack of the kind of interest for which travellers felt themselves bound to look. So, at least, the balance of the evidence seems to show, but the evidence is as conflicting here as in relation to everything else to do with Ireland. While the Bollandist fathers affirm that fifteen hundred foreigners made the pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory during the "Counter-Reformation,"[70] the native contemporary Catholic, Phillip O'Sullivan, living at Madrid, had to go back beyond the memory of living man for the written account of such a pilgrimage with which he wished to preface his history of the struggle against England. Or again, the excellent knowledge the Irish leaders in this struggle received of foreign affairs presupposes a great deal of going to and fro; yet De Thou, in a letter dated 1605,[71] by which date he had been working at his history of his own times for many years and was well known as a man worth helping to correspondents all over Europe, writes that he has not hitherto come across any one who has personal knowledge of Ireland nor even any one who has talked with some one who has been there.