Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/152

 useful servants to their persons, by showing the same care as a father has for a child, and promise him a settlement for life on their return."

Generalization on national characteristics is tempting, but commonly somewhat hazardous. Yet perhaps without great risk of error we may put together a few features that mark most of the English travelers of the eighteenth century in their attitude toward the Continent. Beyond all question the average English tourist was in every sense incompetent to pass judgment upon the people of the Continent. He seldom knew them well enough to be entitled to an independent opinion, and he was compelled to piece out his scanty experience by hearsay and by reading. Too commonly he made the mistake of grouping the people of an entire country under one sweeping category. And rarely did he realize the significance of the things that he saw. The sturdy belief of the average low-class Englishman that any foreigner was immeasurably his inferior was widespread throughout the eighteenth century. English laborers often took delight in hooting and stoning a foreigner, merely because he was foreign. The upper classes were, at least in the greater centers of population, to some extent free from this prejudice and brutality. Yet dislike of foreigners and contempt for their ways were firmly rooted in the minds of most English tradesmen and of ordinary country squires. Some types of English travelers, indeed, were in the habit of admiring everything foreign above anything English. But, all in all, perhaps the most striking characteristic of the ordinary run of English travelers was their insularity and their unreadiness to admit the excellence of anything that was unfamiliar. Even in our time the discriminating Walter Bagehot has observed that there is nothing that the average Englishman dreads so much as the pain of a new idea. This trait was far more marked a century and a half ago and appeared at every