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ART. VII.-1. A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: being a Guide to Holland, Belgium, Prussia, Northern Germany, and the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland. London. First Edition, 1836. Seventeenth Edition, 1871. 2. A Handbook for Travellers in Devon and Cornwall. don. First Edition, 1850. Eighth Edition, 1872. A DISTINGUISHED churchman and scholar of our acquaintance is in the habit, when he leaves his Cathedral Close for a tour among foreign countries and cities, of removing the red covering of his Murray,' and replacing it with a graver vestment of black or grey. By this simple device he flatters himself that when he sallies from his hotel, like Sebastian in the play

to satisfy his eyes

With the memorials and the things of fame
That do renown the city-'

he does not carry his nationality in his hand, and may hope to escape some, at least, of the extortions which fall to the lot of the ordinary Anglais avec son livre rouge.' His success is, we should suppose, very trifling. An Englishman-least of all an Anglican dignitary-even if he be so accomplished a linguist as our friend, will hardly walk the streets of a foreign town undetected, whether the familiar' he carries with him be black or white, red or grey. But however this may be, his plan bears remarkable testimony to the value and superiority of the special familiar which, like the rest of his countrymen, he adopts, and, unlike the rest, disguises. The history of these red books, bearing as it does on that of the many changes in life and domestic habits brought about by modern facilities for travel, is worth attention. Some such guides have become indispensable; and it is only to be feared that (as is often no doubt the case with the best of us) the eyes thus provided should lead to an entire disuse of our own.

A handbook for travellers is essentially an English invention. Englishmen have always been, and still are (unless we ought to except our American cousins), the greatest and most unwearied travellers in the world; but their objects and plans of travel have changed altogether since those early days when it was undertaken mainly for commercial, or for religious purposes. Foreign travel, as the completion of an English gentleman's education, seems to have risen into fashion in the earlier part of the sixteenth century; when the modern world was slowly taking form, and great religious changes were

impending. At this time, besides the younger nobility, who passed from one European court to another, or spent their time at the head-quarters of whatever great military commander was most active or most in repute, another class of travellers had appeared, and was becoming more numerous with each succeeding year. These were men of inferior birth, but many of them still gentry; cadets of the small Esquires' houses, whose claims were duly allowed at each Herald's visitation, and who were then so numerous in every English county. Others of this class could claim no such distinction, and were poor students, patronised often by the great churchmen (as Cromwell by Wolsey), and, at least as often, finding the means of wandering and of subsistence as best they might. This class of wandering students had been produced by the changes in European policy which date from a somewhat earlier period; and which led to the employment of agents and secretaries at the courts of various foreign countries the germ of the permanent embassies of later times. A thorough acquaintance with the languages, and quite as much with the manners, dispositions, and tendencies of the continental nations, was an indispensable passport to employment. Such knowledge seems to have been eagerly sought; and throughout the sixteenth century we find this new class of political agents actively at work, resident at Brussels, at Rome, or at Venice, and in close correspondence with such great ministers at home as Wolsey, Cecil, or Walsingham. For men who aspired to positions of this sort a wandershaft' in early life was an absolute necessity. The Church, with its many openings for men of the humblest birth yet of powerful intellect, was changing, or had changed, its position. The prospects which that had afforded in former days were now unfolding in the world of politics and of active external life. They were readily welcomed for the world was full of seething, stirring, restlessness and ambition; and many a distinguished statesman of that period laid the foundation of his career by a course of travel throughout the principal cities and countries of Europe.

Such travellers reacted, no doubt, on the idler sort,-the youthful nobles and wealthier gentry. With those, at any rate, who, like Bodley, the founder of the famous library at Oxford, were able to interpose their travels between a finished course of academic study and an entrance on diplomatic life, the 'wanderjähre' must have been a time of great and serious labour, spent not only in the acquisition of languages, but in the study of the various national policies and prospects. There are few such travellers now-a-days. But the seriousness with

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which they regarded foreign travel, making the time spent on it one of the chief and most effective periods of education, was speedily adopted by men of all classes, and became the light in which it was held correct to view it, from the days of Peacham's Complete Gentleman' to those of Lord Chester'field's Letters.' By that time the objects of travel had of course greatly changed; yet when Johnson was giving Boswell advice as to what he should seek for when abroad, he did not 'dwell upon cities and palaces and pictures, and shows and 'Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex's opinion, who 'advises his kinsman, Roger, Earl of Rutland, "rather to go 6.66 a hundred miles to speak with one wise man, than five miles "to see a fair town." Johnson's judgment was in harmony with his own tastes, which did not lie in the direction of pictures or Arcadian scenes.' But he repeats the traditional advice of an earlier day; and he might have quoted weighty words of Lord Burghley and Francis Bacon, to confirm the opinion of Lord Essex.'

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În Johnson's day, however, the change had become considerable; and a new era was on the point of opening which, so far as the objects of travel were concerned, was to be productive of far wider results than the period of the Reformation. A love of art-of painting and of architecture—had been gradually becoming fashionable' throughout Europe, since the so-called Renaissance,' and the art-patronage of the Medici. In England it had been encouraged by Charles I.; but the troubles of the Civil War had checked it, and the noble gallery of pictures collected by the King was scattered in all directions. The taste (except in so far as family portraits were concerned) was long in reviving in this country. But it came at last; and from the first half of the last century we may date the beginning of those great collections which adorn the houses of the English nobility, and which have made this country the chief storehouse of European art. Love for such things led to a more general desire for foreign travel; and the study and acquisition of them became one of its chief objects. An excellent proof of the extent to which they were affecting the higher classes of English society is afforded by the letters of the young Lord Tavistock, son of the fourth Duke of Bedford, whose unfortunate fate (he was killed in hunting, in 1767, at the age of twenty-eight) provoked such widespread sympathy. He and his beautiful wife, who survived him hardly a year, are the subjects of two of the finest Sir Joshuas

Boswell's Johnson,' vol. ii. p. 216. (Ed. 1846, in 10 vols.)

in the vast assemblage of portraits at Woburn; and his letters, written in the course of his grand tour,' are full of real appreciation of the great works of art he was seeing, and of delight at the occasional acquisitions he made for himself. The grand 'tour-embracing a journey through France, Italy, Austria, and Germany (Constantinople and the East were as yet beyond the scope) had by this time become the recognised duty of man-at least of all men who held, or thought they held, any kind of position in the world. These were the early days of Walpole and of Gray; whose travelling union ended, as such unions frequently end, in a disunion which was never thoroughly repaired. Art had become the fashion; and to admire the Correggiosity of Correggio, and to praise the works of Pietro Perugino were, as Goldsmith lets us know, the marks which stamped all would-be cognoscenti, and which raised the critic at once to the rank of your traveller, your picked man of countries.'

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The name of Gray suggests another, and as yet hardly developed, phase of the revolution in taste which was affecting foreign travel, and which in the end has affected it more than any other. Gray was one of the first English travellers of note who felt and expressed anything like real pleasure from the contemplation of those great wild prospects' of which his contemporary, Johnson, spoke with so much indifference and contempt. Walpole cared for such things little more than Johnson; but Gray could travel under that huge 'creature of God, Ingleborough,' and look up to the Yorkshire mountain with such a feeling of entrancing awe as a modern tourist might envy; or among the stern rocks of the Chartreuse he could rouse himself to all the enthusiasm of his fine Latin ode:

'Præsentiorem et conspicimus Deum
Obscuras per rupes, fera inter juga,
Clivosque præruptos, sonantes

Inter aquas, nemorumque noctem.'

He was, in short, a pioneer of the great change which, acting first upon letters, was destined to produce a general love of Nature (or, at least, a general affectation of such a love), in her grander, as well as in her softer, aspects; the change which, influencing the English world through Cowper, Wordsworth, and most of all Sir Walter Scott, has produced that rush of travellers in search of the picturesque' which is one of the great characteristics of our time. It is curious to note how completely unknown such a taste seems to have been before the latter part of the last century. Even Shakspeare, myriad

minded and of myriad sentiment, reflects but imperfectly any real feeling for the wilder and grander scenes of Nature-the solemn mountain solitude, or the rock-strewn gorge of the torrent. He delights rather to dwell on such scenery as surrounds his native Stratford-quiet meadows, through which the Avon winds her broad, full stream; tracts of venerable greenwood haunted by troops of deer; or the ridge of breezy upland, overlooking hall and homestead with their wide-spread parks and pastures. And Shakspeare's feeling is the feeling of all the elder English writers. To charm them, Nature must always be more or less cultivated. The utmost roughness they cared to dwell upon was such a landscape as Sidney paints in the Arcadia'-a wide, tree-shaded, but not lonely country, having a show, as it were, of an accompaniable solitarinesse, ' and of a civill wildnesse.'

But whatever the tastes and objects which were influencing foreign travel at the end of the last century, travellers had to depend almost entirely on their own knowledge and resources. Lord Bacon indeed, in his famous essay, advises the young man 'to carry with him some card or book describing the country 'where he travelleth, which will be a good key to his inquiry;' but such cards or books' as existed were either very brief, or very ponderous. It was still the same at a much later period. In other countries than our own there had never been that desire for movement and love of wandering even for its own sake, which was becoming an increasing characteristic of Englishmen. Now and then a brace of learned Benedictines, journeying from convent to convent and from city to city, told something of the history and of the art-treasures of the country through which they had passed, in a Voyage Littéraire;' but such books were intended for the world of savans only; and for the most part for the very few who, like D'Achery or Mabillon, cared chiefly for the manuscript treasures preserved in the libraries of the greater monasteries. These books, like the

travels which produced them, have their special charm; but they were caviare to the general,' and in no way assisted the ordinary grand tourist. Such a traveller, be his rank what it might, was compelled to rely for assistance on the information he might himself bring with him, or, more especially, on the introductions to men of learning and of position which it was then the universal custom to carry. Combined with many difficulties-bad roads, worse inns, many of them much resembling the strange diversorium' of Erasmus' Colloquy, perils from robbers, and even from the political state of the countrythere must have been a degree of pleasure and instruction in