As for England, Hentzner found the limit of £10 in 1599, as did Gölnitz in some year soon after 1618, although Moryson, writing between these dates, gives £20. Still earlier, the Frenchman Perlin, who was here at the beginning of Queen Mary's reign, says that a pedestrian may take no more than ten crowns [£27], a horseman twenty, out of the realm; adding, however, that a man may convert the rest of his cash into goods and so, by realising these goods later, prevent confiscation; and also, that by accompanying an ambassador one is exempt from search. When it is remembered, further, that Francis Davison got inserted in his license to travel a clause enabling him to carry fifty pounds across with him (for three persons), that there were trustworthy merchants who would authorise correspondents abroad to pay the traveller whatever the latter might have deposited with them, and that these customs concerning the export of gold and silver were in use throughout Europe, it will be seen that if a traveller suffered loss by confiscation, he deserved his losses.

By far the greater number had their money advised at a cost of five to fifteen per cent, usually ten per cent, as against the three-quarters per cent which would probably represent a maximum of loss by exchange to-day to tourists. An unknown quantity lay in the differences of values, which might yield a profit, or might involve heavy loss. Bimetallism prevailed all over Europe, and the values of gold and silver both relative to each other and positive, fluctuated far more violently than is the case to-day. When Cavendish returned to England after his first circumnavigation of the world, the plunder depreciated gold in London by one twelfth; in 1603 the exchange from Venice to London was twenty-eight per cent in favour of Venice; in 1606 it was six per cent higher London to Venice than Venice to London.

But with all its disadvantages, remitting by advice was the most generally satisfactory and used method. The tenour of an average bill, however, has changed somewhat, "at sight" being the only one of the variable terms equally customary both then and now. Bills not drawn "at sight" were drawn at "usance," "half usance," or "double usance"; "usance" signifying a month as a rule. Exceptions were, of course, for longer distances, such as London and Venice, when "usance" meant three months; and how completely "usance" is a term of the past is shown by the fact that the periods implied by "usance," in the rare cases in which it is still found in use, have not altered since the sixteenth century, in spite of the advance in the quickness of communications. "Thirds of exchange," now nearly as extinct as "usances," were then kept in regular use by the uncertainty of the posts; and in view of the difficulties in the way of identification and the advantage that money-changers were likely to take of them, advices often contained a description of the payee.[139]

Method No. 3, letters of credit, was a more expensive one than remittance by advice, but for places for which no "usance" was established, was obligatory; under favourable circumstances it might cost no more than ten per cent. There is evidence enough to justify conjecture that the English government allowed their credit to be used sometimes for the convenience of tourists in order to facilitate a watch being kept on their movements.[140]

Barter also ought not to be wholly left out of sight. In Norway dried fish was more serviceable than coin, as was tobacco among Turks, the only people prompt to copy the English in the use of it for pleasure; but by the middle of the seventeenth century the same might be said of Western Russia. And there is the case of one Thomas Douglas in 1600 who could not make arrangements for four hundred crowns to be advised for him at Algiers, applying to the English government for leave to take with him duty-free the broadcloth he had bought with the money and meant to realise there, to discharge the ransom which the money represented.[141]

Supposing, however, that all these means failed? The tourist became a beggar till he found friends. He might try, of course, to raise a loan, but only on terms which would possibly induce him to prefer beggary. The "German Ulysses," Karl Nützel of Nuremberg, was robbed at Alexandria of his capital; at Cairo he persuaded a ship's captain to lend him four hundred ducats, undertaking to pay him six hundred at Constantinople. They arrived thither in two months; the interest was therefore at the rate of three hundred per cent.[142] Sir Henry Wotton, when an ambassador, paid twenty per cent for a loan at Venice.

In considering loans we have passed away from necessities into the second half of the subject of cost,—its reasonable possibilities. These consist of the risks and difficulties to which the traveller was liable, nowhere summarised so well as in the English Litany, which was written at this period:—

"From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder; and from sudden death,

"Good Lord, deliver us."

Of the eight risks here mentioned, to most of which an Englishman at least was more liable abroad than at home, all but two have been minimised since. And if we note how in all other clauses of the Litany, only those troubles or desires which have affinity with each other are grouped together, it becomes significant in what company travellers are prayed for;—

"That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons, and young children; and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord."

To take the risk of violence first, and, among the forms of violence, war, it has to be remembered that the United Provinces was the only State whose soldiers were paid punctually. An effect of this laxness may be traced in the experience of a tourist in Picardy when the latter had been reduced to such a state of destitution by war that the commandants could not wring anything further out of the inhabitants and therefore forced contributions from travellers who passed through. In 1594 Moryson wished to remit from Venice to Paris, but no one had any correspondence farther than Geneva on account of the civil wars, in spite of these being nominally at an end. And they assured him it was twenty to one he would be robbed by the disbanded soldiers (which came true), and, if robbed, would be killed, because if they took him for an enemy they would think him well killed; if a friend, they would kill him to avoid making restitution; and the marshals were so strictly looked after that they would kill anyone who seemed likely to make complaints. The effect on prices receives illustration by comparing Andrew Boorde's experience of Aquitaine after a long period of peace and prosperity,—that one pennyworth [say 10d.] of bread will feed a man a week, and they sell nine cakes a penny, each cake being enough to last a man a day, "except he be a ravener,"—with a letter from a Venetian gentleman,[143] fifty-four years later, by which time civil war had become chronic. He writes from England, where he found that a good meal could be had for ten soldi [2s. 6d.], comparing this with France, which he had just traversed, where the same could not be bought for less than sixty soldi, or even a whole gold crown [£1 13s.]. As to Germany, in 1623, only five years after the Thirty Years' War broke out, Wotton writes that prices have risen enormously, "insomuch as I am almost quite out of hope to find Conscience any more, since there is none among the very hills and deserts, whither I thought she had fled."

But it may be objected that the evidence of a sectarian historian is not admissible on any question of fact. Take, then, what a sober correspondent writes from the scene of the Thirty Years' War in 1639, not of dogs, but of men: "It is an ordinary thing in Brandenburg country to eat man's flesh,"[144] and he goes on to tell how a judge has just met his death that way.

Again, De Thou, approaching Mérindol, finds not a soul to be seen; all had retired to caves at the sight of armed men. Elsewhere he saw all the peasants at work armed, and of one town nothing remained intact but a fountain and one street; the work of a commander, in the king's name, for the gratification of his private revenge. The state produced is well described by Sir Thomas Overbury in 1609 as one in which there was "no man but had an enemy within three miles, and so the country became frontier all over." What "frontier" meant is well defined by an Italian of this time as country to which a few could do no harm and in which many could not live. The prosperity of the Empire while this was the state of France has been already outlined; what it became, as a result of the civil war, while France was becoming the best organised and most civilised country in Europe, may be guessed from Reresby's description of the district which in 1600 had been the most comfortable in Christendom, that between Augsburg and Frankfurt; villages and towns uninhabited, much ground untilled, no meat to be had, no sheets, sometimes no beds; for drink, milk and water, little wine and that sour and very dear; people so boorish as to resemble beasts. Significant, too, is it that while Sir Philip Sidney, defining the qualities of the dominions of Europe for his brother, writes, "Germany doth excel in good laws and well administering of justice," and while all subsequent travellers for forty years confirm this, a German, Zeiler, compiled his guide to Spain shortly before the date when the correspondent just quoted wrote his letter, and in this guide, in maintaining the claims of Spain on the attention of the student, puts among the characteristics in which Spain excels the rest of Europe, the inflexibility of justice there.

Yet civil war was less detrimental to touring than international war, inasmuch as no nation was barred the country for the time being. Besides, fewer mercenaries were employed. Now, however bad the native soldier may have been—and how bad that was may be judged from Shakespeare's picture of him in "Henry V" (Act III, sc. 2),—mercenaries were far worse, seeing that they behaved in the country they were defending as the others did only in that which they attacked. Sastrow followed in the wake of the mercenaries whom Charles V imported; wherever they had passed the way was strewn with corpses. In one house he found the body of a man who had been suspended by the genitals, a usual custom, while they tortured him to make him reveal his valuables, and released by a sword-stroke, not on the cord he hung by, but "flush with the abdomen." From Bamberg they carried off four hundred women as far as Nuremberg, while Hungarians cut off the feet and hands of children and stuck them in their hats instead of feathers. And it is perhaps worth while quoting the effect on Sastrow himself. On his horse being stolen, he "chose the best nag at hand"; and finding a gentleman's house temporarily abandoned, he and his companions stole wholesale, not only to satisfy present wants, but also in order to realise money later.

The effect of all this so far as it concerned tourists may be exemplified by the state of the highroad between Danzig and Hamburg, along which, in 1600, the only corpses in evidence were those of criminals. By 1652, in one day's journey, a traveller[145] could count thirty-four piles of faggots, each pile marking the spot where a wayfarer had been murdered. Each passer-by was expected to add a faggot. Another result was that soldiers continued to exercise during peace the habits they had contracted in war. When Lady Fanshawe passed through Abbeville in 1659, the governor warned her against local robbers, advising an escort of garrison soldiers at a pistole [£3, 6s. 8d.] each. She engaged ten, and met a band of fifty 'robbers.' The ten parleyed with the fifty, and the fifty retired; they, too, were soldiers of the garrison.

Between the soldier and the robber, in fact, the difference was merely that of official, and unofficial, employment. It was in the latter capacity, of course, that they oftenest had dealings with the tourist; or were supposed to do so. One cannot help being struck by the idea that these travellers were far more frightened than hurt, so far as robbery was concerned. A lady, for instance, between Turin and Genoa, saw the road stained with blood where wayfarers had lately been robbed and murdered, yet passed in safety.[146] One traveller, it is true, was stopped four times between St. Malo and Havre, but more normal experiences were those of Moryson, who suffered so but once in more than four years' travel, and of Hentzner, who encountered robbers once in three years and then escaped. He had warning and hired an escort; but it has to be noted that this escort, for one day, cost more than fifty crowns [£90]. Very similar was the experience of the Venetian ambassador Lippomano on his way to Paris in 1577.[147] A rumour got about that he was conveying a loan of eight hundred thousand francs to the French government, and a Venetian ambassador was easy to get information about because of the red trappings of his mules. He was warned, and so were the towns on the route; with the result that his own company were refused admission on suspicion that they were the highwaymen in disguise; and watched, as they passed, by garrisons on the walls. For six days they marched in continual fear; swords drawn, arquebus-matches lighted. Once they thought the "volori" really were upon them, but out of the cloud of dust galloped nothing but the escort from Troyes to relieve the escort from Bar-sur-Seine. And in the end they were fleeced by none but the escorts themselves.

These escorts were part of the life of the time; important towns kept them as a matter of course, in default of a system of country-police such as existed in Spain, the "Santa Hermandad," who first suppressed the thieves and then took over, and extended, their business. In France, however, towards the end of this period, the highways began to be patrolled regularly by police, in couples, none but whom might carry firearms. Yet this arrangement was in force when of the travellers who followed just behind Evelyn on the Paris-Orleans road, four were killed. And within a few years of this some one tells us how he heard cries issuing from the inside of a dead horse, cut open by robbers in order to give themselves more time to escape by fastening their victim inside it, a dirty trick, literally, for he was pulled out in as untidy a state as it was possible for a stark-naked man to be.

To meet, when alone, with two ruffians, to pretend, being on foot and decidedly shabby, to be a beggar; and to pass them thus, not only without loss, but with 1s. 2d. towards his next meal—such was the experience of one Englishman abroad. But what could he have done had the beasts been four-legged ones? Here was another risk to run; and, perhaps, to pay for. There were plenty to meet. It is not surprising to read of them breaking into stables and ransacking cemeteries in Muscovy, where, by the way, protection against them was supposed to be secured by the noise of a big stick dragging at the back of the sledge by a rope; but things were little better near Paris. Readers of Rabelais may recollect a second narrow escape that befell the six pilgrims whom Gargantua ate in a salad in consequence of their hiding among the lettuces to avoid being eaten by him as meat. After their miraculous escape out of his mouth, they barely saved themselves from falling into a snare for wolves. It was no exaggeration to write so about Touraine; in the winter of 1653 a pack entered Blois and ate a child. And just before Evelyn visited Fontainebleau, "a lynx or ounce" had killed some one passing thither by the highroad from Paris. The country between Geneva and Lyons, again, writes one who passed through it, was "mainly inhabited by wolves and bears."

But we have not finished with people. Slavery had to be reckoned with, and therefore ransoms. More than one refers to the "malcontents" of the Low Countries, unpaid Spanish garrison-soldiers who wandered about on the look-out for Englishmen in particular, and esteeming a younger brother's ransom at twenty thousand crowns of the sun [£35,000], says Wotton. But the risk of capture, in the ordinary way, was confined to Mohammedan territory and the neighbouring seashores, with Algiers as headquarters. Many men who were slaves there at this period have left record of their adventures; of whom Gramaye is perhaps the best to quote from, inasmuch as no one was a more acute, thorough, and trustworthy observer. He lived at Algiers in 1619, one of twenty thousand Christian slaves. According to the statistics he gives of the previous twelve years, two hundred and fifty-one ships had brought in twelve thousand, two hundred and forty prisoners, of whom eight hundred and fifty-seven Germans had apostatised, three hundred English, one hundred and thirty-eight from Hamburg, "Danes and Easterlings" one hundred and sixty; Poles, Hungarians, and Muscovites two hundred and fifty, Low Countrymen one hundred and thirty; besides French and others. Fewest renegades came from Spain and Italy, because in those two countries alone were permanent systematic collectors of money for ransoms; the two orders of the Trinity and of Our Lady of Pity paid out sixty-three thousand ducats [over £70,000], in this way yearly, a drain of gold which does not seem to have been taken into account by economists, although not counteracted, but on the contrary increased, by trade transactions with Mohammedan centres like Constantinople and Aleppo, and added to by all the privately paid ransoms. Sir Anthony Sherley ransomed two Portuguese gentlemen for ten thousand pounds, who had been enslaved sixteen years, and for one of whom three ransoms had been sent, each of which had been captured by pirates. The statement already made about all forms of life insurance being censured as gambling must be modified in connection with slavery, for both the law and public opinion approved of a man paying premiums to assure a ransom being paid, and that promptly, in the event of his capture; and the system seems to have been in frequent use,[148] although it must be admitted that not one of these travellers seems so much as aware of its existence.

The expenses of protection against pirates may be imagined from the estimate for the outfit of the galley intended to carry the Provençal deputation to Constantinople in 1585, referred to earlier. The galley-slaves numbered two hundred; the deputation fifty. Sixty soldiers were to be taken for defence, whose wages for the eight months were to be nineteen hundred and twenty crowns of the sun; in addition to which was their keep, nine thousand and forty crowns, and arms and gunpowder, five hundred crowns, the total equalling about twenty-seven thousand pounds of our money.

Of Turkey Sir Henry Blount says that in assuring himself against loss of liberty lay "the most expense and trouble of my voyage." And Blount's opinion is the better worth having, seeing that he would have been the last to fail in the exercise of courtesy and tact, the absence of which is the commonest cause of martyrdom. Several times he had to use his knife to avoid being pushed into a house, and hardly a day passed without his Janizary being offered a price for him. His defences against it in general were to cultivate or buy friends and to make a practice of pretending he had no friends and little money, and that all that remained to him was wagered against his return, because enslavement would be more in hope of ransom than service.

The enslavement of the Jerusalem pilgrim seems to have been comparatively rare before the end of the sixteenth century; yet two of the most striking narratives belong to the year 1565. The first adventure, however, happened during an excursion to Jordan without escort, a risk that none dreamt of running later. A German, named Fürer, set out in February, with a friend, a eunuch-interpreter, and a monk-guide. Sitting down to a meal on the way back, four Arabs appeared, whom they treated as guests; yet, the meal over, the Arabs enquired whether their hosts had any money or garments worth stealing. Doubting their negatives, they undressed them, and beneath the monkish outer-garment which each one was wearing discovered on the two travellers underclothing which suggested riches. The Arabs forthwith led all four away into the desert to sell them at Medina, but were induced before long to despatch the monk with two of themselves to the nearest monastery, that of S. Saba, some hours' journey from Jerusalem, for ransom. The remaining three Franks, unarmed, chose their time to attack the two armed Arabs, and after a desperate fight and a fearful journey, wounded, parched, and famished, Fürer climbed up a rope-ladder into the monastery through one of the back-windows, while the two other Arabs were being kept waiting in the front.

The other tale concerns sixty-two pilgrims who sailed from Jaffa in the August of that same year.[149] On October 16 they were shipwrecked off the coast of Asia Minor, one being drowned. On landing six were killed, the rest taken prisoners, a proportion of whom go to Rhodes. These are urged to apostatise—in vain. They offer ransoms; Frau Johanna of Antwerp three hundred ducats [£540], Pastor Peter Villingen three hundred and twelve kronen [which may mean anything from £200 to £800; probably the former]: the total came to three thousand, two hundred and sixty kronen. This does not seem enough to their owners; the Venetian and some sailors get free somehow; the others are sent to the galleys. During 1566 Frau Johanna and six others die. By May 1, 1568, seven more are dead; two have been redeemed for six hundred kronen; two others for four hundred and eighty kronen. Soon after, an Italian was ransomed by the Venetian "bailo." This is all that is known of the sixty-two.

Another risk that was greater on the Jerusalem journey was that of disease, or enfeeblement through hardship. The state of things normal in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre must alone have told on health; one German on his return to Jaffa counted two hundred and thirty lice in his clothes. But, throughout, disease lay in wait for all in a deadlier form than any we meet with. Just as instead of "nerves" they suffered from "inflammation of the conscience," so, instead of influenza, they had plague, infectious in the highest degree and fatal in a few days, or quicker. In Constantinople it was looked on as inevitable and raged unhindered. Yet, says Blount, the Turks' carelessness was less of a hindrance to trade than the Christians' precautions. In Venice, over the doors of the inn-bedrooms was written "Ricordati della bolletta"—"Remember your bill of health." This "bolletta," or "bolletina," also known as "fede" or "patente," had to be obtained, before entering Venice, from the "commissari" or "soprastanti della sanità," certifying freedom from plague; failing which, or if a "fede" obtained elsewhere was not "clean," i. e. not bearing the official counter-signatures guaranteeing freedom from plague at the last stopping-places, the new-comer had to "far la contumacia," go into quarantine for forty days. The disinfectants consisted of sun, air, and vinegar, and the confinement, if not on board ship, was in a spot chosen for its pleasant healthiness, under shelter which was clean, roomy, and well furnished, with a broad verandah on which one's belongings were to be laid out. This practice was constant at Venice, where ships were always arriving from plague-stricken ports; in the rest of Italy it was frequent but intermittent. Outside Italy a plague-scare occurred more rarely. When it did the healthy but tired wayfarers might find themselves shut out of the town where they looked to find food and rest; perhaps would find the highway itself barricaded[150] by the authorities of a town which was plague-free and determined to remain so, and forced to ride all night by dark and dangerous by-ways[151]—unless they pretended to be an ambassador and his retinue, as some English merchants once did.

Too much stress must not be laid on the troubles of a stranger who fell ill of a less deadly illness. Perhaps, even, a German with the toothache might still have the same experience in Spain as did a countryman of his three hundred years ago. Having tried a cupping-glass himself in vain, he went to the local barber-surgeon; the latter dug the tooth out with a bread-knife! Yet in hospitals a change for the better can be easily proved. The chief hospital at Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, was visited by an Italian[152] in the middle of the seventeenth century. Three or four men lay in each bed, or two women; and the stench was terrible, even to a seventeenth-century nose. At the galley-slaves' hospital at Marseilles, a boy went in front of visitors with a "pan of perfume." Still more to the point, regarding this particular period, was the predicament of a man at the point of death in a district with a different theological stamp from his own, say, a Protestant in a Roman Catholic country. He would then have the choice of accepting the sacrament in the locally orthodox form or confessing himself a Protestant. In the latter case the priest might cut the heretic off from the help, not only of the doctor, but of the cook also, and if he recovered in spite of this, the Inquisition might be awaiting him. And yet a man of average morality would be far less of an adiaphorist in the sixteenth century than to-day. Some Protestants at Venice resigned themselves at death to the only cemetery-burial—that with Roman Catholic rites; but most chose to be buried at sea off Malamocco, trusting in the phrase, "And the sea shall give up its dead."

As to the "sudden death" of which the Litany speaks, if one regards direct evidence only, there may well be a tendency to think the risk of it somewhat exaggerated, but the balance will recover itself if, to the number of travellers who have left us record of their doings, is added that of the dead men who would have told tales if they could. Mile after mile of loneliest road had to be slowly traversed, many a mile through forest where now is open ground, at a time when existed far less force in conventions to restrain those, perhaps even more numerous then than now, like the murderers of Banquo:—

In the towns, the narrow dark streets gave the assassin his opportunity, whether a mistaken one or not. Readers of Cellini's autobiography will recall his remark that he trained himself to turn corners wide and may have noted it as merely characteristic; but before Cellini's book was in print, we find the French tourist, Payen of Meaux, writing of the Venetians, "Quand ils marchent la nuit, ils ne tournent jamais court pour entrer dans une Rue; mais ils tiennent le milieu, afin d'éviter la rencontre de ceux qui voudroient les attendre."

Supposing, however, that a foreigner died in peace, what happened to the money and chattels with him at the moment? According to Zeiler, in Aragon the practice was to notify the authorities at his native place and hold the goods at the disposal of the legal heirs for a year, after which limit unclaimed property was handed to the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Pity to be employed in the redemption of captives. In Rome the custom was for the servant to take the dead master's clothes. In France the State took absolutely everything by the "droit d'aubaine," which was the law wherever feudalism had established itself, though sometimes in abeyance; in Poland it seems to have been completely so.[153] The strictness, on the contrary, with which it was enforced in France is well illustrated by the fate of the library of Sir Kenelm Digby, who died at Paris in 1665. It was forfeited to Louis XIV by the "droit d'aubaine"; he gave it away; the new owner sold it to a relative of the late owner for ten thousand crowns.

This right, based as it was on the same "right to pillage" under which the Jews suffered in the Middle Ages,[154] brings out very clearly one fact which was always liable to affect a traveller's finances, namely, that in so far as he was a traveller, he had no legal privileges. Two Dutch gentlemen,[155] for instance, were at Paris at a time when war between Holland and France suddenly became imminent. They found the financial agents forbidden to pay them on bills of exchange or letters of credit, and their goods were temporarily confiscated. It was the ordinary procedure of the time. Here again is obvious the advantage of going in the train of an ambassador; the latter's rights were the fullest protection that an alien could acquire, except mercantile ones at their best. Yet even these ambassadorial rights lacked so much of the fullness and the clearness that they possess to-day that they were not put forward in a modern form, not even in theory, until the treatise of Grotius on the subject published in 1625.[156]

These Dutch gentlemen just mentioned found themselves in difficulties on their arrival in Paris in another way also. They had introductions to good society; fashions had changed while they were en route; they must stay in their lodgings till the tailor had done his worst. Even if they had been going to Jerusalem they would still have felt the relationship between cost and clothes, a relationship decidedly closer then than at present. Only in going to Jerusalem it took this form, that the shabbier you went the less the journey cost. As to kind, preferably such as were worn by Greeks, friars, merchants, or Syrian Christians. The pilgrim's ordinary dress, described in one of those picturesque snatches of verse with which Shakespeare's contemporary, Robert Greene, lightened his tales,—

was no protection against suspicion of riches. Yet it was supposed to lessen the risk of being kidnapped into slavery at Algiers on the road to Montserrat if one carried the white pilgrim's staff.

Crossing the Alps, for a northerner who did not wish to be conspicuously alien, meant a complete change into black silk; for the brilliant attire which we see in productions of "Romeo and Juliet" reflects Elizabethan England, not Italy. Italy manufactured those multi-coloured materials, it is true, but for export or official use only, except for the ash colour that betokened a vow not perfected.

Typical minor incidents were the purchasing of a new handkerchief in Germany, of light-coloured silk, and, as to size, somewhat resembling a saddle-cloth, with initials of some motto worked in a corner thereof, say D. H. I. M. T. ("Der Herr ist Mein Trost") or W.H.I.B. ("Wie heilig ist Bruderschaft"), and secondly, the story of a sugar-loaf hat. An Italian priest wore it in Italy—but not in France. Before leaving Lyons he had grown tired of a crowd of children following him about. So far from being able to sell it, it was impossible to find any one who would take it as a gift until he met a man whose business was partly selling a powder which killed mice. The rest of his business was the profession of town-fool. That being so, he could accept the hat; he cut it into the shape of an imperial crown and gave himself out as the Emperor of the Moluccas.

A complete change into French clothes cost this priest two pistoles [£8], and he adds the detail that nowhere was waterproof material to be bought. The waxed cloth which was sold as such cracked wherever it had been folded.

On occasion, too, changes of clothes might be a legal obligation. The sumptuary laws might step in and forbid the new-comer to wear what was perhaps his one respectable garment. Or again, in Muscovy, foreigners used to dress as natives to avoid the jeers of the crowd; but at some date early in the seventeenth century the Patriarch noticed Germans behaving irreverently at a festival and complained that foreigners ought not to seem included in the benediction that was given to the faithful. Foreigners were therefore ordered to revert to their national dress, which produced most ludicrous results until the tailors could finish new garments; inasmuch as the merchants had to fall back on those that had belonged to their predecessors, leaving sometimes a whole generation between the fashions of their upper and nether garments.

All these things might fall on the tourist: each one cost money; some one, at least, of them he would hardly escape. One more source of possible loss existed, one that he was certain to have to face—the money itself. The variety of coins was just as great as the variety of clothes, though with this difference that the clothes were as local as the coins were international—just the opposite of the case to-day. This is not equally true, of course, of all denominations, and the majority may not have circulated so freely as in preceding centuries, but the higher ones seem to have passed about from hand to hand with little more hesitation than Australian sovereigns do in England. When exceptions occurred, they generally had political causes: French gold, for example, being more willingly taken by the Swiss than other foreign gold because they had become so used to it in the course of serving as French mercenaries.

Of the uncertainties of the tourist, however, in relation to coins, that caused by their international character would be the first to disappear. There remained a trinity of diversities to bewilder him permanently and to deliver him over, defenceless, to the dishonest: diversity of value, diversity of kind, diversity of inscription.

To take the last first; it might seem that absence was a more appropriate term than diversity, seeing that the nominal value of a coin in circulation about 1600 was only in the smallest percentage of cases stated on its face; and when one comes to think of it, it is only the tourist who ever reads a coin for business purposes. Where the diversity comes in lies in the fact of certain names becoming popular, such as "paolo" in Italy, which meant that many different types would be struck, all "paoli" but none alike. As to variations in value these may be illustrated from the Venetian zecchino, the Hungarian ducat, the sultanon of Constantinople and the sheriff of Cairo. All of these are reckoned as equal in one year or other between 1592 and 1620 by one or other trustworthy traveller, yet the differences of value of one coin or other of the four vary from 6s. 8d. to 9s.; and this was not a steady rise. In fact, the difference between the 1592 and 1620 valuations is but fourpence. Moreover, the settlement of values was far less a commercial affair merely than it has become; governments were forever tinkering at it by means of proclamations, all telling against the tourist, since their object was to attract, or to retain, bullion, which either depreciated the value of the coin he wished to change or appreciated that of the coin he had to acquire. Lady Fanshawe mentions a proclamation of October 14, 1664, at Madrid which cost her husband, ambassador there, eight hundred pounds. Since then, paper money has come to absorb all the political dishonesty that used to be exercised on coins, and the far less abrupt modern methods minimise the loss to the tourist. The French government went bankrupt fifty-six times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[157]

As to the other diversity, that of kind, Lauder saw a proclamation which assessed the values of five hundred coins then current in France.

The whole of the above refers mainly to gold and the higher denominations of silver. Yet these more important coins were a simple matter compared with small change, especially in Italy; for when the tourist had been confronted with soldi, grossi, giuli, paoli, reali, quattrini, susine, denari, cavallotti, cavallucci, carlini, bagatini, bolignei, baocchi, baelli, etc., he could not but feel relieved when, crossing the Alps, he had only to face Swiss plapparts and finfers and the German batz, kreutzer, stiver, copstück, sesling, pfennig, and not many more. The grosch perhaps ought to be mentioned as well if only for the fact that Taylor, the "water-poet," when at Hamburg, noticed that among twenty-three groschen he had in his pocket there were thirteen varieties, owing to the number of local mints. He valued all these at twopence each, but as a matter of fact groschen varied so greatly that to give one away might be either extravagance or an insult. There were, of course, many multiples of these denominations, and besides coins, tokens innumerable, all having but this in common that when one had gone a few miles further they would not be taken in payment. They might be made of base metal, like that of the famous "Mermaid" tavern which is preserved at the "birthplace" at Stratford-on-Avon, or of leather, or almost anything else solid.

In Muscovy were no native coins but silver, and those so small that the Muscovites used to keep dozens in their mouths because they slipped through their fingers—and that without incommoding their speech. In Spain,[158] so far as there was any standard, it was the Castilian real, which you might exchange for thirty-four Castilian maravedis, forty Portuguese rais, thirty-six Valencian dineros, twenty-four Aragonese, and thirty-eight Catalonian dineros. But these Portuguese coins would not be taken in Castile, nor the Castilian in Valencia, nor Valencian anywhere out of Valencia. Along the chief merchants' road in Spain, from Barcelona, you might go one hundred miles, as far as Lerida, and find every place with a different minor coinage, current there only, and in Barcelona one was especially liable to receive coins which no one, not even in Barcelona, would accept.

On the Jerusalem journey the higher payments were reckoned in foreign money usually, the Italian gold zecchini and silver piastri most frequently; smaller ones in brass meidines of Tripoli or of Cairo, equal to about a penny farthing and twopence respectively, or in aspers, about three farthings.

Just as, further, the tourist could examine a coin without being able to find out its nominal value, could ascertain the latter and still be ignorant of its real value, so, too, he was continually having to pay reckonings in coins which did not exist. The Venetian and Spanish ducat, the German gulden, the French livre tournois, the Muscovite rouble, and, later, their altine also, were coins of account only. All these coins were as commonly used in daily business in their own localities as guineas are in English charities; and the ducat and the gulden far outside them. In the seventeenth century the Spanish pistole was actual coin in its own country and coin of account in France; board and lodging on "pension" terms would be reckoned in pistoles in Paris. In fact, the French equivalent for "rolling in riches," "cousu de pistoles," is equally evidence of the international character of seventeenth-century gold and of the method of carrying it.

The tourist in 1600 has done his touring. His money is spent; his pleasure is buried; his wisdom gathered; and the fruit is ours. And now; was the pleasure worth the money? was the wisdom worth the gathering?

The answer is, most emphatically, Yes!—Yes for them, and Yes for us. But as to the latter question there were two answers then, and the subject has suggestions beyond those that have come up so far. Let us look at this adverse opinion, and one or two of the suggestions.

During the sixteenth century it became a convention to abuse travel, especially travel in Italy; a convention which may have been more fruitful in England than elsewhere, but certainly was not so to the exclusive extent which modern books in English seem to imply. The difficulty would be to find a nation whose literature at this time does not contain examples of it; even in Poland, where of all places travel was most taken for granted, this topic was one of the first to be dealt with when the vernacular was turned to literary account, namely, in the satires of Kochanowski. When examined, these invectives turn out to have won more attention than they are entitled to, written as they generally are, especially in England, by the class whose medium is nowadays the half-penny paper or the 'religious' novel. We find among their authors all the familiar figures, from the hack-journalist who parades a belated morality for the sake of his stomach down to the bishop to whom the subject, when worn rather thin, is revealed as a brand-new dummy-sin. It is curious that this very bishop, Joseph Hall, should in describing his own journeys, unconsciously provide the most clear-cut sketch of how not to travel that has, perhaps, ever been written.[159] If, among these types, we miss the retired colonel, we must remember that the title was so recently invented, the times so bloody, that all the colonels were probably either fighting or dead. At any rate, the interest of this type of pamphlet belongs rather to the history of publishing than to that of travel, as dating the time when publishers first discovered what a paying public can be created among the lower levels of Puritanism. The proportion of fact that gave them a starting-point may best be put in perspective by pointing out the parallel that exists between travel in Italy three hundred years ago and modern motoring. Nobody who could afford it went without; everybody who could not afford it abused everybody who did; it killed some, maimed others, benefited most, and brightened the life of many a poor rich man who otherwise would have departed this life little better off mentally than his own cows. These pamphleteers were committing the fundamental error of allowing their attention to be absorbed by the seven eighths of foolishness that characterises everything human instead of concentrating it on the other eighth which provides the justification as well as the driving-force. For a sober, all-round, view of the question as it appeared to a man who was both man of the world and scholar, one cannot do better than turn to a letter written by Estienne Pasquier, a letter of introduction for a son of Turnebus. "Comme il a l'esprit beau, aussi lui est-il tombé en teste, ce qui tombe ordinairement aux âmes les plus généreuses, de vouloir voyager pour le faire sage.... S'il m'en croit, il se contentera de voir l'Italie en passant; car ce que Pyrrhus Neoptolemus disoit de la Philosophie, qu'il falloit philosopher, mais sobrement, je le dy du voyage d'Italie, à tous nos jeunes François qui s'y acheminent par une convoitise de voir."[160]

Yet there is one defect of their travels which necessarily escaped notice at the time but cannot fail to strike any one now, which is, how much they passed by without a glance. It is commonly thought that the contrast of travel in days gone by with that of the later times is one of leisureliness as against universal effort to go "faster, farther, and higher" than one's neighbour. But the truth is that in what essentially characterises leisureliness in travelling, the leaving time and energy free for enjoying and studying places on the road, and still more, off it, they were more wanting than we. They went the greatest pace they could; where they stopped at the night they left at dawn; and overnight they had been too tired to explore amid the filth, the dangers, the darkness, the inextricable confusion, of a sixteenth-century town or hamlet. Yet if you call to mind the towns seen in passing which you recollect most vividly, most will probably be those in which your first walks happened after dark. And is there any Gothic cathedral, however grand, whose outside is not commonplace by day compared to its glory by night?

Moreover, the dearth of information narrowed not their opportunities merely, but their interests likewise. Carnac and Stonehenge were no doubt a long way out of their way, but the dolmen of Bagneux was no more than three-quarters of a mile from Saumur, where many of them stayed for weeks, or even months. Yet not a single one, apparently, went to see it. As for the opportunities, not only was Pompeii still buried for them, but Rome itself was, as Montaigne says, not so much ruins as a sepulchre of ruins. When, again, some one says of Lyons that the houses are fine but the streets so ill-smelling and dirty that one cannot stop to admire them, it may remind us that much that was nominally visible was practically invisible; whether through being what was, to them, a considerable distance off their routes, like Brou or Laon, or, as with most cathedrals, through houses being built up against them. Similarly, the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes is a case in point; houses having been erected inside it so freely that in 1682 five hundred men capable of bearing arms were supposed to be dwelling there.[161] And along with these conditions of living went ideas to correspond; the total effect being half-prohibitive of the occupations of the artist, the historian, and the archæologist, and this at a period when a larger proportion of the greatest buildings of Europe coexisted than at any other period. In fact, so far as the Loire châteaux are concerned, it is clear that the modern tourist sees far more of some of the finest Renascence work than did its contemporaries, who were restricted here to a visit to Chambord and a glimpse of the outsides of Blois and Amboise.

But after all deductions of this kind have been granted, they may well reply that their concern was not so much with that part of the present which we term the past, but with that which we term the future, their individual futures, in particular; and that their object was achieved; adding, moreover, that travel under these conditions was certainly superior to travel of the twentieth century, considered as a form of education in the wider sense of the word. For not only was it obligatory to share the life of the country and its language to an extent which is optional now, but a traveller was continually being thrown on his own resources and presence of mind in matters which concerned his self-respect, his health, and his safety, whereas now everything is merely a matter of cash.

Turning to the benefit to us in day-by-day matters accruing from their experience abroad, so many instances have already shown themselves that the burden of proof falls on the other side; whether, that is, any contemporary effort worth making, any contemporary achievement to which we are indebted, has not been in some degree fashioned and vitalized by influences due to travel.[162] If one further instance, typical of much else, is to be chosen, it may be pointed out how almost everything that contributes to the material attractions of Dublin is due to those who, in exile on the Continent, saw the gain that lay in planning a city finely. Further still, their knowledge of languages, acquired at a time when vernaculars were coming into their own, resulted in an infusion into each vernacular of the additions it needed to assimilate to enable it to fulfil its potentialities for the purposes both of every-day life and of life at its best. It is curious and significant that the Pole who has just been quoted as an opponent of travel, Kochanowski, learnt the value and, one might even say, the possibility, of using the vernacular as a medium of literature from associating with members of the "Pléiade" in France.

Far above these and the rest; far outweighing, too, all imaginable drawbacks, was the value of the central idea, that of taking those who were to enjoy the widest opportunities of usefulness and influence, and bringing them, when their conscious receptivity was at its highest, into personal contact with the whole of that world in which, for which, and with which, their lives were to be spent. That was its value at that time. But it had a future as well as a present value, inasmuch as the results of the system were cumulative, more especially in so far as it served the purpose of bringing these younger men into touch with the best teachers and those older men of the finest achievements, to gain acquaintance with whom was always insisted on as an object second to none in importance. As Bacon said, these travellers were "Merchants of Light." They contributed a definite share towards strengthening and widening what is the only effective agency of real advance in civilisation, "that better world of men," of which the contemporary poet Daniel was reminded by the "Essays" of Montaigne.