makes their laughter very immoderate.  When they have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities which they brought over with them, fresh travellers arrive with newer fashions, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen."[385]

When these products of a French education could not remain in town, but were obliged to live on their estates amid rough country squires, it went hard with them.  “They will by no means embrace our way,” says The Country Gentleman in Clarendon’s Dialogue of the Want of Respect Due to Age, “but receive us with cringes and treat us with set speeches, and complain how much it rains, that they cannot keep their hair dry, or their linnen handsome one hour.  They talk how much a better country France is and how much they eat and drink better there, which our neighbors will not believe, and laugh at them for saying so.  They by no means endure our exercises of hunting and hawking, nor indeed can their tender bodies endure those violent motions.  They have a guitar or some other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their beds before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them, to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire.  In a word, they live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know whether they eat and drink or no."[386]

Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation with local government, which was the chief duty of the country gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had learned little of the laws and customs of their own country.  Clarendon draws a sad picture of the return of the native who was ashamed to be present at the public and private meetings for the administration of justice, because he had spent in dancing the time when he might have been storing knowledge, and who now passed his days a-bed, reading French romances of which he was tired.

Locke also set forth the fallacies of the Grand Tour in his Essay of Education.  He admitted that fencing and riding the Great Horse were looked upon as “so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought a great omission to neglect them,” but he questioned whether riding the Great Horse was “of moment enough to be made a business of."[387] Fencing, he pointed out, has very little to do with civil life, and is of no use in real warfare, while music “wastes so much of a young man’s time, to gain but a moderate skill in it, and engages