Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
Just as, further, the tourist could examine a coin without being able
to find out its nominal value, could ascertain the latter and still
be ignorant of its real value, so, too, he was continually having to
pay reckonings in coins which did not exist. The Venetian and Spanish
ducat, the German gulden, the French livre tournois, the Muscovite
rouble, and, later, their altine also, were coins of account only.
All these coins were as commonly used in daily business in their own
localities as guineas are in English charities; and the ducat and the
gulden far outside them. In the seventeenth century the Spanish pistole
was actual coin in its own country and coin of account in France;
board and lodging on "pension" terms would be reckoned in pistoles in
Paris. In fact, the French equivalent for "rolling in riches," "cousu
de pistoles," is equally evidence of the international character of
seventeenth-century gold and of the method of carrying it.
The tourist in 1600 has done his touring. His money is spent; his
pleasure is buried; his wisdom gathered; and the fruit is ours.
And now; was the pleasure worth the money? was the wisdom worth the
gathering?
The answer is, most emphatically, Yes!—Yes for them, and Yes for us.
But as to the latter question there were two answers then, and the
subject has suggestions beyond those that have come up so far. Let us
look at this adverse opinion, and one or two of the suggestions.
During the sixteenth century it became a convention to abuse travel,
especially travel in Italy; a convention which may have been more
fruitful in England than elsewhere, but certainly was not so to the
exclusive extent which modern books in English seem to imply. The
difficulty would be to find a nation whose literature at this time does
not contain examples of it; even in Poland, where of all places travel
was most taken for granted, this topic was one of the first to be dealt
with when the vernacular was turned to literary account, namely, in
the satires of Kochanowski. When examined, these invectives turn out
to have won more attention than they are entitled to, written as they
generally are, especially in England, by the class whose medium is
nowadays the half-penny paper or the 'religious' novel. We find among
their authors all the familiar figures, from the hack-journalist who
parades a belated morality for the sake of his stomach down to the
bishop to whom the subject, when worn rather thin, is revealed as a
brand-new dummy-sin. It is curious that this very bishop, Joseph Hall,
should in describing his own journeys, unconsciously provide the most
clear-cut sketch of how not to travel that has, perhaps, ever been
written.[159] If, among these types, we miss the retired colonel, we
must remember that the title was so recently invented, the times so
bloody, that all the colonels were probably either fighting or dead.
At any rate, the interest of this type of pamphlet belongs rather to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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