Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/145

 Italian scholar, and wrote and conversed in the French language almost with as much ease as he wrote and conversed in his own." Here and there an Englishman, like Chute, who spent seven years in Italy, mastered the language. But few had either the time or the inclination to do so much. Horace Walpole had a tolerable familiarity with Italian, and a quarter of a century after his Italian trip he congratulates himself in a letter to Mann: "I was pleased the other night at the Italian comedy to find I had lost so little of my Italian as to understand it better than the French scenes." But he had no great mastery of it. He tried in 1750 to write a letter to Dr. Cocchi, acknowledging the gift of his Baths of Pisa, but finally gave up the attempt and asked Mann to express thanks for him. Limited also was Walpole's mastery of French, although he had enough for all practical purposes.

All things considered, the acquaintance of the most intelligent English tourists with French and Italian was very respectable. But with the rarest exceptions, one of whom was Carteret, who had traveled widely in Germany, Englishmen in the eighteenth century were entirely ignorant of German. English tourists seldom knew more than a phrase or two of the language. Even a reading knowledge of German was a very rare accomplishment among Englishmen. Trained scholars like Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, and Parr were unable to use German books. Horace Walpole's acquaintance with German enabled him as late as 1788 to say no more than "I am told it is a fine language." "But even in German courts," says Leslie Stephen, "the travellers knew no German, and the home-staying British author remained in absolute and contented ignorance." We have, then, the surprising fact that, although England during the greater part of the eighteenth century was ruled by the House of Hanover and thus brought into the closest political relations with Germany, Englishmen were almost untouched by German culture until after the French Revolution. Indeed, long after German had won a fixed place in English education it presented peculiar difficulties to