Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/139

 fine Observers, Shakespear has described to consist In talking of the Alps and Apennines, The Pyrenean, and the River Po, and then concludes with a Sigh, Now this is worshipful Society."

Obviously, the offhand estimates of foreign lands that such tourists made were often grotesquely false. But the more ambitious accounts attempted by travelers who drew sweeping conclusions from limited data were little better. "An author of this cast, after a slight survey of the provinces through which he has had occasion to take a short ramble, returns home, and snatching up his pen in the rage of reformation, fills pages on pages with scurrilous narrations of pretended absurdities, intermixed with the most shocking tales of fancied crimes; very gravely insisting that those crimes and absurdities were not single actions of this or that individual, but general pictures of nature in the countries through which he has travelled."

Baretti has particularly in mind the "Letters from Italy" of Dr. Sharp, who, as he declares, "was ignorant of the Italian language; was of no high rank; and was afflicted with bodily disorders." "Sharp," says Baretti, "saw little, inquired less, and reflected not at all; blindly following his travelling predecessors in their invectives against the pope's government." As a whole, he characterizes Sharp's book as "the production of a mind unjustly exasperated against a people, whose individuals either knew him not, or, if they knew him, treated him with benevolence and civility, as they do all the English, and all other strangers who visit their country."

The uncompromising attitude of Sharp and of many other English tourists toward Italy was doubtless in part due to their Protestantism. Not that the ordinary traveling Englishman in the eighteenth century was enthusiastic over his religion; but he had an instinctive dislike of popery, and more than a little contempt for the usages of the Roman Church. To some extent his feeling was shared by many intelligent Frenchmen and Italians, who gave only a nominal allegiance to the traditional beliefs, and often not even