an architect charged to make him understand the beauties of Italian art.[359] Antoine Delahaute, making the Grand Tour with an Abbe for a governor, carried with him an artist as well, so that when he came upon a fine site, he ordered the chaise to be stopped, and the view to be drawn by the obedient draughtsman.[360] Not only did gentlemen study to appreciate pictures, but they strove themselves to draw and paint.  In the travels of George Sandys[361] (edition 1615), may be seen a woodcut of travellers, in the costume of Henry of Navarre, sketching at the side of Lake Avernus.  To take out one’s memorandum-book and make a sketch of a charming prospect, was the usual thing before the camera was invented.  “Before I went to bed I took a landscape of this pleasant terrace,” says Evelyn in Roane.[362] At Tournon, where he saw a very strong castle under a high precipice, “The prospect was so tempting that I could not forbear designing it with my crayon."[363] Consequently, we find instructions for travellers reflecting the tastes of the time:  Gerbier’s Subsidium Peregrinantibus, for instance, insisting on a knowledge of “Perspective, Sculpture, Architecture and Pictures,” as among the requisites of a polite education, lays great stress on the identification and survey of works of art as one of the main duties of a traveller.[364]

Significant as are the instructions of Gerbier, Lassels, and others of this period, there are some directions for an education abroad which are more interesting than these products of professional tutors—­instructions written by one who was himself the perfect gentleman of his day.  The Earl of Chesterfield’s letters to his son define the purpose of a foreign education with a freedom which is lacking in the book of a governor who writes for the public eye.  Though the contents of the letters are familiar to everyone, their connection with travel for “cultum animi” has hitherto, I think, been overlooked.

It will be remembered that the earl sent his son abroad at the age of fourteen to study for five years on the Continent, and to acquire a better preparation for life than Oxford or Cambridge could offer.  Of these universities Chesterfield had a low opinion.  He could not sufficiently scorn an education which did not prevent a man from being flurried at his Presentation to the King.  He remembered that he himself, when he was first introduced into good company, with all the awkwardness and rust of Cambridge about him, was frightened out of his wits.  At Cambridge he “had acquired among the pedants of an illiberal seminary a turn for satire and contempt, and a strong tendency to argumentation and contradiction,” which was a hindrance to his progress in the polite world.  Only after a continental education did he see the follies of Englishmen who knew nothing of modern Europe, who were always talking of the Ancients as something more than men, and of the Moderns as something less.  “They are never without a classic or two in their pockets; they stick to the old good sense; they read none of modern trash; and will show you plainly that no improvement has been made, in any one art or science, these last seventeen hundred years."[365]