Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/141



Absurd as were some of the English estimates of men and things on the Continent, they were due not wholly to personal, temperamental prejudice, but in part to the altogether inadequate preparation for travel that many tourists had. If one may trust Gibbon, eighteenth-century students were only too likely to emerge from an English university almost as ignorant as when they entered. In any case their range of information was singularly narrow. Says a very competent observer: "It is easy to perceive that the English universities are in less repute than they were formerly. The rich and great, who, at one time, would on no account have omitted to send their sons thither, now frequently place them under some private tutor to finish them, as it is called, and then immediately send them on their travels."

We must admit that exceptional men like Warburton and Blackstone and Mansfield and Wesley and Chesterfield and Johnson and Gibbon, and many others who attended the universities, did, sooner or later, in spite of great laxity in the curriculum and the discipline, attain high scholarship. But in general standards were low. In any case, from a young man in society no great learning was expected. If he had gone through Oxford or Cambridge, he could not avoid picking up the rudiments of Latin and Greek and some bits of information about ancient Rome and a few other cities, but of the topography, the history, the government, the art, the architecture, the social conditions of the countries he intended to visit, he was strangely, and, to our thinking, often disgracefully, ignorant. The lack of adequate preparation for appreciating the sights of the Continent left the ordinary young tourist helpless in the attempt to get more than a casual and unsystematic addition to his stock of knowledge. To one who knew nothing of history or architecture the remains of antiquity meant little: the Forum was a cow pasture, the Circus Maximus a brick heap, the Catacombs ill-smelling holes.