Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/23



is hardly necessary to remark that extensive foreign travel was nothing new to Englishmen of the eighteenth century. Journeys to Rome were not uncommon in the time of Bede, and, as Chaucer incidentally remarks, the long and hazardous pilgrimage to Jerusalem was thrice accomplished by the Wife of Bath, who unquestionably had no lack of companions. Many women before the fourteenth century had actually made that journey. The pilgrimage to Compostella in Spain was made by vast throngs in the Middle Ages. Voyages of discovery in all parts of the world had already become common in the reign of Elizabeth. Migration to America took tens of thousands of colonists across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.

In comparison with these perilous ocean voyages the tour of the Continent of Europe, though by no means easy or entirely free from danger, was a mere pleasure trip, and Englishmen of rank had long been accustomed to make it. Mr. Sidney Lee well says: "The value of foreign travel as a means of education was never better understood, in spite of rudimentary means of locomotion, than by the upper classes of Elizabethan England. All who drank deep of the new culture had seen the wonders of the world abroad." In another place he remarks: "Throughout the century young Englishmen of good family invariably completed their education in foreign travel and by attendance at a foreign university. In many quarters the practice was deemed to be perilous to the students'