These two facts, then, glorified Elizabeth in the eyes of foreigners; first, that she was a queen and a great ruler when effective queenship was half a myth; secondly, that she remained unmarried when virginity, considered as a virtue, was, so to speak, due to have its last flicker before finally dying down. The reign of James I was a sort of after-glow, except in so far as he had a reputation as a philosopher-king. These ideas have a marked effect on the visitor's itinerary. He hurried, as a rule, to London, and thence, if the court was away, to that one of the palaces which was in use for the time being. The other country palaces, none far from London, would receive a visit, at any rate Windsor and Hampton Court; Oxford probably, Cambridge possibly, and there an end. Of Scotland and Wales it can only be said that the former was practically ignored except by a few Frenchmen, as a result of the ancient alliance; while to Wales they paid as little attention as the semi-Welsh queen did—none at all. Among the foreigners who have given us their impressions of England are several who have much that is of interest to say and yet who seem to have been entirely overlooked. Nevertheless, these pages are already more numerous than the relative importance of England warrants. Let us therefore take but one, and that one the briefest; the more so since he is the likeliest to continue to be overlooked, writing as he did in Polish, from which hitherto no translation seems to have been made, not even in paraphrase. Jakób Sobieski, the only man who was ever four times Marshal of the Polish Diet, travelled all over Europe in his youth. Henry IV of France made a personal friend of him, and it was at Paris that he spent more time than elsewhere, where, eventually, he witnessed the assassination of the king and was nearly lynched himself on the spot by the mob who took it into their heads to regard him as the murderer. However, he not only escaped, but after justice had been done on Ravaillac by his being torn asunder by horses, Sobieski had an invitation to dinner from a bootmaker who had collected certain pieces of Ravaillac and was arranging a loyal dinner-party at which they were to form the chief dish.