Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/136

 that if some little delay is occasioned, they will rather leave their money behind than stay to recover it."

Dupaty, in his "Letters on Italy," observes: "In a hundred there are not two that seek to instruct themselves. To cover leagues on land or on water; to take punch and tea at the inns; to speak ill of all the other nations, and to boast without ceasing of their own; that is what the crowd of the English call travelling. The post-book is the only one in which they instruct themselves." They amply illustrate Babeau's comment on most travelers, that they see only the outsides of things, "monuments rather than men, … inns rather than houses, … routes rather than the country."

As the sight-seeing was largely a conventional duty, some tourists wasted as little effort upon it as possible. Dr. Moore cites an amusing instance of economy of time in seeing Rome. "One young English gentleman, who happens not to be violently smitten with the charms of virtu and scorns to affect what he does not feel, thought that two or three hours a day for a month or six weeks together was rather too much time to bestow on a pursuit in which he felt no pleasure, and saw very little utility. The only advantage which, in his opinion, the greater part of us reaped from our six weeks' tour was that we could say we had seen a great many fine things which he had not seen. Being fully convinced that the business might be, with a little exertion, despatched in a very short space of time, he prevailed on a proper person to attend him; ordered a post chaise and four horses to be ready early in the morning, and driving through churches, palaces, villas, and ruins, with all possible expedition, he fairly saw, in two days, all that we had beheld during our crawling course of six weeks. I found afterwards, by the list he kept of what he had done, that we had not the advantage of him in a single picture, or the most mutilated remnant of a statue."

Traveling with haste and inattention as they did, the observations of most tourists were of singularly little value. We have a good number of eighteenth-century