Turning to the benefit to us in day-by-day matters accruing from their experience abroad, so many instances have already shown themselves that the burden of proof falls on the other side; whether, that is, any contemporary effort worth making, any contemporary achievement to which we are indebted, has not been in some degree fashioned and vitalized by influences due to travel.[162] If one further instance, typical of much else, is to be chosen, it may be pointed out how almost everything that contributes to the material attractions of Dublin is due to those who, in exile on the Continent, saw the gain that lay in planning a city finely. Further still, their knowledge of languages, acquired at a time when vernaculars were coming into their own, resulted in an infusion into each vernacular of the additions it needed to assimilate to enable it to fulfil its potentialities for the purposes both of every-day life and of life at its best. It is curious and significant that the Pole who has just been quoted as an opponent of travel, Kochanowski, learnt the value and, one might even say, the possibility, of using the vernacular as a medium of literature from associating with members of the "Pléiade" in France. Far above these and the rest; far outweighing, too, all imaginable drawbacks, was the value of the central idea, that of taking those who were to enjoy the widest opportunities of usefulness and influence, and bringing them, when their conscious receptivity was at its highest, into personal contact with the whole of that world in which, for which, and with which, their lives were to be spent. That was its value at that time. But it had a future as well as a present value, inasmuch as the results of the system were cumulative, more especially in so far as it served the purpose of bringing these younger men into touch with the best teachers and those older men of the finest achievements, to gain acquaintance with whom was always insisted on as an object second to none in importance. As Bacon said, these travellers were "Merchants of Light." They contributed a definite share towards strengthening and widening what is the only effective agency of real advance in civilisation, "that better world of men," of which the contemporary poet Daniel was reminded by the "Essays" of Montaigne. ... That better world of men, Whose spirits are of one community, Whom neither oceans, deserts, rocks nor sands Can keep from th' intertraffic of the mind. SPECIAL REFERENCES CHAPTER 1 SOME OF THE TOURISTS [1] Purchas, viii, 258.