Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/147

 country, and with the constitutions, the laws, the usages, and the morals of the various nations. In this improving fashion he spent two years.

The young Englishmen who made the grand tour doubtless occasionally measured up to this high ideal, though in general the net result was not so much a thorough training in any one thing as a smattering of many, and a merely superficial polish. But in any case, this system of training was well established.

In wealthy English families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the education of young men was largely in the hands of private tutors. A few great public schools, like Eton and Winchester and Westminster, were famous, but for a variety of reasons many parents preferred to keep their sons under their own eyes and engaged private teachers for home training. And even after a youth had gone through a public school and the university, the tutor was felt to be the most suitable companion for the Continental tour, the importance of which was taken for granted. But, evidently, much would depend upon the character of the tutor. A high-minded, well-balanced scholar might be of inestimable service to a youth eager to improve his opportunities. But the number of well-equipped tutors must have been relatively small. The low ebb to which education had sunk at Cambridge and Oxford had brought it about that only an occasional scholar was even moderately competent to direct the work of his pupil, to say nothing of serving as a guide on the Continent. "Intelligent foreigners are not a little surprised, when they behold our young gentlemen sent abroad in the company of persons doubtless of good character, but not unfrequently as new to the scenes they experience as the very pupils entrusted to their care. I will make no comment upon such a text." But the tutor was expected to be, not merely a preceptor, but a guide, counselor, and friend. "He should be," says Vicesimus Knox, "a grave, respectable man of a mature age. A very young man, or a man of levity, however great his merit, learning, or ingenuity, will not be proper, because he will not have