Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/77

Rh travelling like noblemen. Anthony Bacon's long travels so seriously embarrassed his estate that he never afterwards was out of debt. During these travels he found himself, in 1582, in Bordeaux, and there he formed a friendship with the Sieur de Montaigne. At that time about a year had passed since Montaigne's return from a seventeen months' tour through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The young traveller and the older one must have exchanged many pleasant memories of places, persons, and things. Montaigne, keeping a diary, and less interested in sights than in the ways of life of foreign folk, their social and political institutions, was such a traveller as Bacon would have been, if it had been his fortune to travel in mature years. Of Englishmen, the late Elizabethan, John Evelyn, cultivated, observant, tolerant, is also of the sort. But no Elizabethan traveller is merely chatty. Fynes Moryson's Itinerary and Coryats Crudities, in spite of its quips and cranks, are valuable records of travel under Elizabeth and James.

In the essay Of Studies a lifelong student describes his craft. "He was no plodder upon books," writes his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, "though he read much, and that with great judgment, and rejection of impertinences incident to many authors; for he would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking, or taking the air abroad in his coach, or some other befitting recreation [in the Latin version Rawley adds 'gentle exercise on horseback and playing Rh