After a winter in Italy, they were about to start for Paris to perfect themselves in dancing and to begin riding the great horse, when they received news that the Earl of Cork was ruined by the rebellion in Ireland.  He could send them no more money, he told them, than the two hundred and fifty pounds he had just dispatched.  By economizing, and dismissing their servants, they might reach Holland, and enlist under the Prince of Orange.  They must now work out their fortune for themselves.[354]

The two hundred and fifty pounds never came.  They were embezzled by the agent; and the Boyles were left penniless in a strange country.  Marcombes did not desert them, however.  Robert, who was too frail for soldiering, he kept with him in Geneva for two years.  Francis, free at last, took horse, was off to Ireland, and joined in the fighting beside his brothers Dungarvan, Kynalmeaky, and Broghill, who rallied around their father.[355]

There are several other seventeenth-century books on the theory of travel besides Lassels’, which would repay reading.  But we have come to the period when essays of this sort contain so many repetitions of one another, that detailed comment would be tedious.  Edward Leigh’s Three Diatribes[356] appeared in 1671, a year after Lassels’ book, and in 1678 Gailhard, another professional governor, in his “Directions for the Education of youth as to their Breeding at Home and Travelling Abroad,"[357] imitated Lassels’ attention to the particular needs of the country gentleman.  “The honest country gentleman” is a synonym for one apt to be fooled, one who has neither wit nor experience.  He, above all others, needs to go abroad to study the tempers of men and learn their several fashions.  “As to Country breeding, which is opposed to the Courts, to the Cities, or to Travelling:  when it is merely such, it is a clownish one.  Before a Gentleman comes to a settlement, Hawking, Coursing and Hunting, are the dainties of it; then taking Tobacco, and going to the Alehouse and Tavern, where matches are made for Races, Cock-fighting, and the like.”  As opposed to this life, Gailhard holds up the pattern of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, who did “strive after being bettered with an Outlandish Breeding” by means of close application to the French and Italian languages, to fencing, dancing, riding The Great Horse, drawing landscapes, and learning the guitar.  “His Moneys he did not trifle away, but bestowed them upon good Books, Medals and other useful Rareties worth the Curiosity of a Compleat Gentleman."[358]

On comparing these instructions with those of the sixteenth century, one is struck with the emphasis they lay upon drawing and “limning.”  This is what we would expect in the seventeenth century, when an interest in pictures, statues, and architecture was a distinguishing feature of a gentleman.  The Marquis de Seignelay, sent on a tour in 1617 by his father Colbert, was accompanied by a painter and