Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/29

 those that most concern us in this study, though we shall often have occasion to look back to the early eighteenth century — and sometimes to the seventeenth.

To realize the conditions under which men lived in the eighteenth century is not easy. There are, indeed, only three or four generations between us and the gay throngs that crowded the salons of Paris before the Revolution. But the eighteenth century, notwithstanding its nearness in time, and the immense mass of information that we have about it, appears strangely remote, separated from us as it is by the great gulf of the French Revolution. The century of which men still vigorous have known many living representatives impresses us as markedly different in temper and point of view from our own. In a thousand ways the difference forces itself upon even the most careless observer — in the forms of government, in the rigid structure of society, in the fashions of dress, in the popular amusements, in the lack of facilities for travel and communication — in short, in all those particulars which distinguish the old, unprogressive régime with its numberless feudal survivals from our own bustling, democratic age.

Looking at the matter from one point of view we may say that there is no side of eighteenth-century life that might not in some way affect the tourist, but for our purpose the problem is much simpler. We need to know something of the political systems of the countries visited on the grand tour, for to those systems were due many of the restrictions laid upon the tourist. We need to know the times when peace prevailed, for, obviously, while there is war the average man will not undertake a tour, but will remain safely at home. We need to know of the means of travel, of the state of the roads and where they ran, of the inns and how one fared in them, of fashionable society and how it impressed the tourist, as well as the impression the tourist made upon society: in short, in so far as is possible in a book that must touch many things lightly if at all, we must endeavor to follow the tourist from place to place and see with him some of the sights that most interested