Such presents were customary on a very large scale on the continent; in France they generally consisted of wine and were presented to persons of high rank only, but in Germany every gentleman received gifts of drink and food which usually cost more than their value in tips and dinners. The higher the rank of the visitor, the greater the quantity; the Infanta Clara Eugenia writes home that at the stopping-places in her passage through Switzerland the gifts require thirty or forty men to carry them, who lay them at her feet until she is surrounded by barrels and has the greatest difficulty in preserving her gravity. At Lucerne she received barley as well as wine, and two oxen, both too fat to move. Many other local customs had to be submitted to which have died out since; such as ceremonies of initiation into the freedom of Hansa League towns, which were accompanied by practical joking; the obligation on Protestants staying at Geneva to attend service at 7 A. M. whenever there was a sermon; and so on.

Among these exceptional customs and regulations should be mentioned those concerning weapons in Italy. At Lucca no knife might be carried unless blunted at the point; in the Papal States, a sword was allowed, but no short, easily hidden, weapon; in Venetian territory fire-arms only were forbidden; elsewhere a license from the local authorities had ordinarily to be obtained for wearing a sword, and in Florence the license only referred to day-time. This is Moryson's account of the regulations; before his time the regulations were laxer, and later they became stricter, which gave a great impetus to the poisoning trade; in fact, the bakers in Lombardy were mostly Germans, and those of Rome, Jews, the Italians being unwilling to trust their fellow countrymen.

Such subjects naturally suggest executions, which formed one of the commonest and principal "sights" throughout Europe. Lithgow landed at the Piazzetta at Venice just when a friar was being burnt alive there for getting fifteen nuns with child in a year. It was in Venice, too, that Moryson saw two young senators' sons, who had had too uproarious a night, have their hands cut off at the places where they had done the mischief, their tongues cut out where they had sung blasphemous songs, and finally beheaded by a sort of guillotine in the Piazza. And when he was staying at Leipzig, where, as was the custom in Germany, adultery was punishable by death, a case had recently occurred of a girl giving birth to an illegitimate child in a church, during service. It was under consideration when he left whether an ancient precedent should not be revived to meet her case, that she should be tied up in a sack with a cat, a cock, a snake, and a dog, all alive, and so drowned. To quote one more as a sample of many, there is the detailed description of a man being broken on the wheel at Hamburg, by Taylor the "water-poet." The place of execution was on a mound, so that the enormous crowd could see well; moated, to keep the people at a distance, and approached by a drawbridge which was raised during the execution; the criminal was drunk, according to custom. In Germany exceptional criminals were on view for some days before execution, nailed by the ears to posts. Torture accompanying execution was common, and branding and mutilation things that no traveller could well avoid seeing. But none seemed to want to avoid them: Evelyn went to the Châtelet prison at Paris to look on while a prisoner underwent legal torture. The only occasions that seem to have struck them as too horrible was when the headsman bungled matters: a Dutchman at Paris saw one try sixteen times and then have to be assisted. And as in the towns, so by the wayside. Gallows and wheels bearing the bodies of men and sometimes of women, dying, dead, or decaying, were continually to be seen: Taylor says he counted seven score between Hamburg and Prague, and Moryson mentions a criminal hanging in chains near Lindau, starving to death, with a mastiff at each heel, in order that he might be partially eaten before death.

No less awful a sight, and no less frequent in certain places, such as Marseilles, was the galley-slave, naked except for a pair of breeches, shaven, dragging behind him when ashore the chain fixed to his feet, treated worse than a beast, and yet not necessarily criminal: at Leghorn was a tent, at Naples a certain stone, where a man might stake his liberty against a few shillings on a throw of the dice. Among the few who obtained their release by being bought out were those who, on that condition, acted as deputies in the processions of flagellants which tourists often mention: Montaigne witnessed one at Rome with five hundred persons in it. He, like others, was astonished to note their unconcern; the scourging was genuine: their backs were raw and bloody, the thongs of the scourges adhering to each other with the blood; yet so far from showing signs of pain, they marched along, careless and talkative, in an every-day mood.

Other forms of slavery were ordinarily met with: at Naples an open slave-market was held; at Lisbon, too, where men and monkeys were sold side by side. And here and there one might come across settlements of those who could not claim all the benefits of the law. Zinzerling picked up a cagot servant near Toulouse, a young man, well-informed, who told him how his brother-outcasts had just petitioned for permission to marry whom they chose, offering to have their blood tested to prove it no different from other men's. Those who did not act as servants, lived by handicraft, carpentering mostly; they were forced to dwell in the suburbs, and nothing they owned was heritable except furniture, which was looked on as sharing their taint.

But he does not mention the goose-foot badge which distinguished them from "clean" persons. The badge of the Jew, on the other hand, often seen, is often mentioned, varying according to the extent they had acquired influence and used it. In Poland, thanks to the Jewish mistress of one of their kings, they had almost equal rights with Christians. Elsewhere, except in those places, such as England, which they were nominally forbidden to enter, a badge was compulsory; lightest in Mantua, merely a bit of yellow lace tacked on inside their cloaks, but generally a red hat for the men and a red garment for the women: red as betokening their guiltiness of Christ's blood. An alternative colour was yellow, as in Rome, where a short-sighted cardinal once mistook a red-hatted Jew for a brother cardinal and obtained a change of colour in order to safeguard himself against being so polite again.

But the tourist's leisure, so far, has been too much occupied with blood and social damnation; let us look for a lighter mood: let us see him at the Zoo. Florence seems to have been the best stocked. Rabelais saw two Zoos there, and this was not an optical illusion of a credible kind, for he localises them differently; one at the Palazzo Strozzi with porcupines and ostriches as the "stars"; one near the Belfry, boasting lions and tigers. Moryson mentions one only, the Duke's, containing five lions, five wolves, three eagles, three tigers, one wild cat, bears, leopards, an Indian mouse which could kill a cat, and wild boars. After another fifty-year interval comes Evelyn, who looks down upon all the animals housed together in a deep court, a pleasanter confinement, he thinks, than the narrow cages of the Tower at London. But I have forgotten Audebert, who should have come between (1576) Rabelais and Moryson, and who found a Zoo near the "Annunziata," possessing fourteen lions, a tiger, an eagle, and a vulture therein. In 1592 at Prague there were twelve camels in the Emperor's Zoo, very probably the sons and daughters of those whom Busbecq brought back from Constantinople in the hope of naturalising them in Europe as beasts of burden,—not the only attempt of the kind, for Sir Wm. Brereton saw some so used in Holland, and a German others near Aranjuez. The leopards, moreover, in this same Imperial Zoo, were taken to assist in hunting.

Experiments and novelties such as these, of course, provided a larger part of the interest of a journey then than is the case now, when such news is communicated immediately through the newspapers. We find Tommaso Contarini, ambassador to Flanders, greatly struck by the value of peat as fuel, and bringing back some to Venice to assist him in ascertaining if anything of the kind is obtainable near. Then there was "Der Einlasse," the complicated night-entrance to Augsburg, worked by mechanism which allowed a person to be admitted without seeing any one,—such a mystery that many allowed themselves to be locked out on purpose to see it work, and Queen Elizabeth sent a special agent to acquire the secret; in vain. But in Augsburg front doors were habitually opened by pulleys from some room, and shut automatically; it was at Augsburg, too, that a coach was to be seen "driven by engines" within it by the occupant so that it seemed to go of itself; it had been driven about the city.[54] This occurs in the year 1655; three years later fountain pens[55] were on sale at Paris for ten francs each, twelve to those whom the inventor knew to be eager to have one; that is, £5 to £6 in our money. Even an Italian might learn: like the Florentine who discovered in England what garden-rollers were, in their early solid-stone-cylinder form. But Tasso had the chance to learn something important and not only passed it by but places it first among the three customs in France which he strongly condemns. It is that in some districts the people nourished the children with cow's milk. How, he asks, can any good come of feeding infants with the produce of an animal that is a beast of burden and has to endure blows daily? An Englishman in Italy noted the method of stripping hemp with wooden instruments instead of with the fingers, the laborious English way; and fans, forks, and umbrellas would be new to every one who crossed the Alps; but a learned physician warned Moryson against using the last-mentioned, "things like a little canopy," as concentrating the heat of the sun on the head.

In Flanders, again, every one might learn what kind of a thing a door-mat was, and a Dutch barber had only to cross the Channel to find that he was behind the times in using dregs of beer as a lather. And if it was possible for a twentieth-century Englishwoman to cross into sixteenth-century Germany she would find out what a convenience it was for an invalid to have a towel attached to a wheel running along the head of the bed, to assist him or her in changing position. Where, too, except from travel, his own or some one else's, did Sir John Harington get his ideas concerning the introduction of real water-closets, with gold-fish visible swimming about in the cisterns, just as they are to be seen at railway stations to-day?

A greater discovery than all these put together lay in the differences in the position of women in the above countries. Take the United Provinces and Italy, as the two where the contrast was greatest. In the former, girls of good birth and looks might not only settle down in the common-room of an inn instead of hiring a private room for meals, but would sit round the fire and share the after-dinner drink of the men as a matter of course. All-night skating-parties were so common that the liberty was not misused; whereas in Italy the strictness was as extreme as the Dutch freedom, and its result, too; only, in Italy, the result was the demoralisation of both sexes. Chioggia was an exception, where Villamont was surprised to see the women and girls sitting at their doors, needle-working; and where French influence had made itself felt some relaxation had taken place, especially at Genoa, where one foreigner even notes that the women walked with a longer stride than most Italian women. But the unmixed Italian convention gave most girls no choice between becoming either prisoners or prostitutes, that is, of course, like everything else in this book, from the foreigner's point of view. Of the former class the tourist saw next to nothing; the men of the household did even the marketing themselves; while the latter formed one of the best-known features of Italian life. The numbers may seem at first sight incredible—30,000 is the figure always quoted for Naples; but there was some check on such statements inasmuch as every government licensed each one for a fixed sum and therefore could reckon the total. Moreover, Sir Henry Wotton writes in 1592 that a census just taken in Rome counted 40,000, and he had it on good authority; and in 1617, that the Espousal of the Sea at Venice had been spoilt as a sight because the courtesans, offended at an edict directed at them, had abstained from taking part in it. Those at the head of the profession lived "like princesses," not only so far as expenditure went, but also in their command of marks of respect in public, except that every now and then some sumptuary edict would create, and perhaps enforce, some distinction between those who populated and those who depopulated Italy. It is pleasanter to turn back to Holland again, to the homely arrangements of Thursday in Delft fair week, when the women who had had enough of waiting for husbands sat in the church and the men who had waited long enough for wives came to look at them. A few questions, a pot of beer, a few details to be settled; and then the wedding.

There were plenty of these fairs, Lyons had four a year, so had Rouen; but the attraction they possessed for the sixteenth-century human being lay rather in the amount of wholesale and financiers business done than in homely picturesqueness; sentimentality is the last vice he can be charged with. Who, for instance, nowadays, would dare to say he saw nothing charming in a Breton festival? but Brittany was left to itself in those days, and a travelling doctor who chanced on one leaves it with the remark that the Breton girls singing their folk-songs reminded him of "the croaking of frogs when they are in love." Yet St. John's Eve was a festival that gave plenty of pleasure to lookers-on as well as those who took part in it; at Paris, in particular, where there was hardly a citizen named after the saint who did not light a fire at his door that night. And it is perhaps worth mentioning how they kept that feast at Naples, according to Audebert, in 1577; how the custom was to bathe in the sea previous to paying one's devotions at "S. Giovan' a' Mare," seeing that he adds that the custom was dying out, the younger people scorning it as a pagan survival.

A larger proportion of the public pleasures of Europe were bound up with religious ceremony than is the case at present; and as regards pilgrimage, the reference above to the subject in general needs to be supplemented by some details concerning the relics, since there is no room for doubt as to whether or not they held their ground as "sights," the more so inasmuch as a sceptical attitude did not become a conventional habit of mind until, to judge by tourists' books, about the third quarter of the seventeenth century. At the abbey of Marmoutier, near Tours, for example, was shown a vessel which had been sent from Heaven filled with oil for the healing of St. Martin's leg, a breakage of which the devil had caused by taking away the stairs. They also showed a vast barrel wherein St. Martin kept his wine; but not till 1675 does any one remark that that was probably the fiend who stole away the stairs. Disbelief finds expression in plenty, it is true, but it is always that of the Protestant who disbelieves, not because his reason tells him the tale must be false, but because Roman Catholicism affirms it to be true. When there was no suspicion of a friar at the back of the story, there was nothing they would not swallow: even Evelyn accepts Mettius Curtius and his chasm as if all four evangelists had guaranteed both; or, to take a still better example, that of the monument near Leyden to the lady who had 365 children at one birth—(she had laughed at a poor woman's tale that the latter's two babies were twins, and the woman had expressed a hope that the lady might give birth to as many children at one confinement as there were days in the year)—Münster, the great Protestant geographer, repeats the story without throwing doubt, and consequently one tourist after another has no hesitation about it.

So happy a frame of mind must have increased the interest of many a resting-place. Breaking one's journey at Angers, for instance, there was a porphyry vase to be seen, one of those used at the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee; others were preserved at Famagosta, Magdeburg, and the Charterhouse at Florence. At Angers, also, at St. Julian's, was a copy of the portrait of Our Lady which St. Luke had painted; at Arras, manna which had fallen in the days of St. Jerome, looking like white wool; at Milan, the brazen serpent which Moses set up in the wilderness; at Vienna, one of the stones wherewith St. Stephen had been stoned, another at Toulouse; and at the monastery of the Celestines at Louvain, one of the thirty silver pennies for which Christ had been sold, bearing the head of Tiberius on one side, a lily on the other. It is well known how Mary Magdalen came to Provence to live after the Crucifixion, but less known that at Maximilien near Marseilles the tip of her nose used to be on view: no more than that because she had been cremated, but the tip of her nose remained imperishable because there Christ had kissed her. Pontius Pilate also ended his life in Europe: in exile at Vienne, where the tower in which he had been imprisoned was pointed out to the visitor, likewise the lake wherein he had committed suicide, although it was on the shores of another lake, one in the territory of Lucerne, that he was to be seen walking once a year in his official robes. But this every one was content to take on hearsay, since he who saw him then died within the year.

The monastery of St. Nicholas at Catania, in Sicily, had an excellent collection: a nail from the Cross, one of St. Sebastian's arrows, and pieces of St. George's coat of mail, of St. Peter's beard, and of the beard of Zachary, father of John the Baptist. This, and the places previously mentioned, serve to show what treasures would surely be met with on the road; great relic-centres like Venice and Rome would require pages to catalogue their wealth; even a secondary centre like Trier held as many bodies of saints as there are days in the year, besides the well by which Athanasius sat when he composed the "Quicunque Vult" and the knife wherewith St. Peter cut off Malchus' ear.

As for their belief in relics, it is only fair to point out what may not occur to every reader, that they had the same reason, neither more nor less, for believing so, as we for believing that the earth moves round the sun: it is common knowledge. 'Common knowledge'—is not all of it, whether scientific or theological, equally an act of faith? and is it more reasonable for us to quote Baedeker to ourselves than for pilgrim Nicholas to put his trust in friar John? "Howbeit (if we will truly consider it), more worthy is it to believe, than to know as we now know"—that is not a quotation from a theologian but from Bacon's "Advancement of Learning." Of two things we may be sure, that the true history of a relic would probably be far stranger than its legend, and that whatever marvels the southerner saw or heard, he came across nothing more novel or more miraculous than the ebb and flow of the northern tides.

In speaking of relics, the secular ones must be remembered, too: foremost among them the original Ephesus statue of Diana, which Hentzner saw at Fontainebleau and Evelyn at the Louvre. Most frequently mentioned is the buck's head at Amboise. It bore antlers of enormous size, and for that reason had enjoyed Francis I's special protection while alive. By Sir John Reresby's time (1654) it had been ascertained that the buck was of English birth, having reached France by swimming the Channel; while thirty-three years later it had been dead for three hundred years and at the date of its death was nine hundred years old. These details need no explanation; any caretaker can equal them under pressure. The writer once asked the sextoness of the church where Spinoza lies buried how he came to be laid there considering he was not exactly orthodox: the answer was, without hesitation, that he became a Protestant before he died!

These secular relics cannot possibly be left without a digression concerning unicorn's horns, which were more prized than any other kind of exhibit. St. Mark's Treasury at Venice seems to have been the only museum that possessed more than one; it contained three. Dresden owned one, which hung by a golden chain; that at Fontainebleau, three yards high, was valued at one hundred thousand crowns. It was, however, a wise unicorn that knew its own horn: the Danish sailors kept their secrets quiet and prices high, the more easily since, owing to disasters, there were temporary cessations in the Greenland whale-fishery, of which unicorns' horns were a by-product, thus rendering the supply small and fluctuating. It was an open secret by this time that sea-unicorns existed, but the heraldic animal had the overwhelming advantage of support from Pliny, Aristotle, and the Bible and therefore fought for the "crowns" so to speak, with every success. It was not till this time, in 1603, that the unicorn was introduced into the arms of the King of England; and its horn was in the greater request because of its supposed quality of an antidote to poison. To the lore of this part of the subject Zinzerling makes an addition. At Tours lived a lawyer who had travelled in Spain and India, and had brought back three great rarities: "Rolandi gladium, Librum in pergameno Geographiæ et Hydrographiæ, membrum masculum Monocerotis majoris contra toxica efficaciæ quam cornu."

He did not see these personally, but mentions them because it would be a pity for any one to miss them for lack of a word or two from him. For himself, he could not find the lawyer, a kind of trouble from which these tourists ordinarily suffered, for it was part of their experience to make acquaintance with private collections. Not that there were any public ones to the extent we are accustomed to, except the churches, which, as picture galleries, had this advantage, that the pictures were seen in the setting for which they were designed. Practically all the official "treasuries" were only public to the extent that a remarkable country house like Compton Winyates is so now; yet on the other hand, and for that very reason, it was somewhat more customary for private collections to be accessible to strangers than is the case, probably, at present. What attracted the greatest number of visitors, however, was water-mechanisms.

Up till the beginning of the seventeenth century these were found at their best only in Italy; and of the Italian, those at Pratolino ranked first, belonging to the Duke of Florence, who was reputed to spend more on his water than on his wine. The invariable custom of secret devices for soaking the visitor as he sat down or walked about was there carried further, and with greater variety, than elsewhere. Besides, there was Fame blowing a trumpet; a peasant offering a drink to a tiger who swallows it and then looks all round; Syrinx beckons to Pan to pipe, whereupon Pan gets up from his seat, puts it aside, pipes, pulls his seat towards him and sits down again with a melancholy look because Syrinx has not rewarded him with a kiss. And so on, with a multitude of devices for making music and attracting attention, only equalled by those at the Villa d' Este at Tivoli.

It is noteworthy how long it took to introduce them into France, where everything Italian was fashionable. Marguerite de Valois speaks of those she saw in Flanders in 1577 in a way that implies no previous acquaintance with anything of the kind, but when peace was restored, we find St. Germain-en-Laye stocked with a poet who plays on a lyre, and with various animals which gather round him, and trees which bend down, as he plays; and the king passes by with his suite. On the other side of the Rhine ingenuity seems to have been devoted rather to clock-work. The clock at Strassburg, one of the chief marvels of Europe, was outdone by one in a private house at Augsburg: for besides displaying all the clever puerilities which the seventeenth century rejoiced in, it reproduced the movements and stations of the planets and the advent and effect of eclipses, all in their due time. Somewhat later, at Lübeck, the striking of the hour by the town clock was accompanied by the Virgin kissing her Baby, and St. Peter dropping his key and picking it up again, while at Hamburg could be seen a marvellous Annunciation, with a most gorgeous Gabriel and five attendant cherubim who flapped gilded wings, and a Blessed Virgin dressed in the French fashion who was discovered reading a book and ended by dropping a curtsey.

Of amusements which required people to take part in them, card games were rarely seen in Germany, and in Italy were banned as much by public opinion as by law, whereas in England they were an occupation rather than an amusement. So also with hawking and hunting. In six years abroad Moryson saw hawking but twice, once in Bohemia and once in Poland, and implies that in England it was common; while of hunting he definitely says, "England lacks not Actæons, eaten up by their own dogs." The same contrast he observes with regard to itinerant musicians and plays, of which latter he is sure that more are performed in London than in all the other parts of the world that he had visited put together. A variety of angling, on the other hand, he notes as peculiar to Italy: that with bait and hooks fastened to corks and held out of window for birds; while golf was only played in Scotland, Holland, and Naples; and the most frequently played game in Europe, pallone, was as unknown in Britain then as now. The piazza S. Stefano at Venice was reserved for pallone every Sunday evening, and in the disused papal palace at Avignon one room was given up to pallone and another to tennis, which came next in popularity, the chief centre being Paris. In 1577 it was credited with 1800 courts, but the Dutch ambassador resident there eighty years later had them counted and only discovered 118.

And so the list might go on and on and on—in all its seeming irrelevancy! And yet, when it is borne in mind that every detail is one that some tourist or other noticed, to the point of thinking it worth recording, a certain, at least symbolic, relevancy comes into view, even though it be nothing more vital than that of a 16th-century variety of subjective imbecility under the stimulus of a jog-trot. On the other hand, all this comes under the heading of

So the scenery must be shifted.

PART II
THE UNVISITED NORTH

Andrew Boorde has something to say about Iceland in his guide to Europe. He puts into the mouth of a native the words,—

And that is all they knew about Iceland. As a country with a political history and a literature it was no more present in their minds than as a holiday resort. Nor were any of the countries that bordered the Baltic, except on the South. But Danzig alone was enough to keep the Baltic a busy sea, and consequently Denmark was not as much ignored as would otherwise have happened; for both sides of the entrance to the Baltic belonged to the King of Denmark, whose extortions in the way of tolls kept his name before the public.

Norway was thus practically isolated from Europe. Sweden, however, during the Thirty Years' War, attracted some attention, partly on account of its share in the war, partly on account of the development of its silver mines. There is an interesting account of a visit to those at "Sylfbergen," twenty leagues from Stockholm, in 1667, which may serve as an indication of experiences that might have been met with at an earlier date. The visitor, a Frenchman,[57] descended, half-naked, in half a cask, which was attached to a cable by three iron chains, accompanied by two workers whose grimness, flavour, and unpleasant personalities, gave him an attack of nerves. Among the miners he found French, Germans, English, Italians and Russians, all, as he says, digging their own graves, for the conditions of mining in those days was terrible. A traveller through Hungary in 1615[58] notes that the miners there could not work more than four hours at a stretch, and that few reached middle age, what with the number of casualties and the conditions of the mines. One result of this was that they usually married at fifteen. Yet weekly wages, after making allowance for the cheapness of living in Hungary, were equivalent to no more than twelve to fourteen shillings at present values. It was a most natural question at the time to ask whether, working as they did in the bowels of the earth, they ever came across demons. To which question a miner answered that sometimes they did, and on those occasions they appeared in the shape of little black boys, chattering, but doing no harm beyond blowing the lamps out.

Returning northwards and continuing the journey to the other side of the Baltic, the dominions of the Grand Duke of Muscovy would not be reached immediately. Riga, the port most usually aimed at, belonged to Poland; the alternative harbour of Revel to Sweden. The choice of Riga is another instance of the contemporary preference for travelling by water rather than by land. However far out of the straight line between Danzig and Moscow, it was both the nearest coast town to the latter and also at the mouth of the river, the Dwina, which is navigable for the longest distance west of Moscow. One other route remains, discovered by the English, left wholly to them and to the Dutch, and only used by them because of commercial quarrels with the rulers of the Baltic. This was the sea-voyage of about two months from London to Archangel, then up the Dwina and Suchona to Vologda, and thence by land to Moscow.

Moscow then possessed about forty thousand houses. It may be doubted if any town in Europe surpassed that number. Yet it was not size that caused going to Muscovy to be practically identical with going to Moscow, but the fact that the latter was the residence of a ruler whose despotism was so unlimited that every other settlement became insignificant compared with that where he dwelt. This is typified by the prominence given by all foreigners to the banquet they generally attended as the guests of the Tsar, a display of barbaric magnificence that must evidently have been one of the most striking sights of Europe. Unfortunately the magnificence was apt to stop short at the door of the banquet-hall. One Italian[59] in particular could not forget leaving after three hours, picking his way through the outer rooms, pitch dark and strewn with courtiers in the weeping-stage of drunkenness, down the stairs. About twenty yards away from the foot of the stairs a crowd of servants were waiting with horses to take their masters home. Towards these they had to wade, knee-deep in mud, still in pitch-darkness, and so continue a good part of the way home, since no one was allowed to ride till he had passed out of the palace precincts.

Nowhere was this despotism more felt than in relation to travel: every foreigner was half a prisoner from the day he entered the kingdom to the day he left, even though he were an ambassador. The very Jesuits sent by the Pope, in 1581, at the Tsar's own request, to negotiate a peace between himself and the King of Poland were under surveillance to such an extent that they were not allowed to water their own horses. Neither was any subject allowed to leave the land: the penalty for unlicensed travel being death. It is clear that leave must have been more freely granted than one might imagine from the general statements of visitors, since Russian pilgrims and merchants are by no means uncommon, and indeed, at this period, Peter Mogila, Metropolitan of Kiev, and Boris Godunov, ruler at Moscow, endeavoured to encourage travel by Russians as a means of education.

Godunov's efforts, in fact, beginning as they did with his accession in 1586, synchronised with the growth of the same idea in England. But his efforts failed through being too far ahead of public opinion; those whom he sent stayed away permanently, those who stayed at home remained unconverted.[60] Two instances of public opinion as regards foreigners may be quoted, both occurring on the direct road to Moscow at the very end of this period, during the whole of which the number of visitors goes on increasing. The first is the experience of some Dutchmen who came by invitation of the Tsar and consequently had a house commandeered for them. The wife of the owner, seeing no help was to be had from the local authorities, rushed to St. Nicholas and would, she believed, have obtained a miraculous expulsion of the visitors had not her husband tired of the length of her prayer and stopped it by force. The second is that of a Danish gentleman who, with his companions, was prevented from entering a village by bees which the peasants had irritated for that purpose.

So, too, with the Muscovites and travel on their own account. Whereas other Europeans only thought of dying when they travelled, the Muscovite only thought of travelling when he died. Then his friends shod him with a new pair of shoes for the long journey that he had to go, and put a letter in his hand to St. Nicholas, by way of passport, testifying that the bearer died a Russian of the Russians in the one true faith.

The distinctive characteristics of the people as seen by strangers were drunkenness, endurance of heat, cold, and torture, and slavish obedience to the Tsar. Drunkenness in particular. As the English verse-writer, Turberville, who went there, puts it,—

The habit went the farther since it was encouraged by the government, for the recent taking-over of the drink-traffic by the State was but a reversion to the state of affairs in 1600, though then it was an offence against the State to urge a man to leave one of the State-owned taverns, even though he was pledging the clothes off his back: a common custom. At every season of public rejoicing in winter two or three hundred died in the streets of Moscow as they lay there naked and dead-drunk, and the stranger might see the bodies brought home by tens and twelves, half-eaten by dogs. One traveller tells a tale of a Muscovite whom he saw come out of a tavern in shirt and breeches only, meet a friend, return, and come out again with no shirt. The traveller, who knew Russian, expressed sympathy with him as if he had been robbed, but was answered, "No, it's the man at the bar and his wine that have brought me to this, but as my shirt's there my breeches may as well keep it company." And accordingly, a few minutes afterwards, he came out once more with nothing to cover him but a handful of flowers picked at the tavern-door!

There had been a Tsar who tried to repress drunkenness, but he became a dead failure in every sense of the phrase shortly before the above incident happened, and even during his lifetime achieved nothing more than preventing people going about the streets naked. Neither was it just the average man who could not endure life sober, but the priest frequently needed a lay-helper on either side of him in order to get through the marriage service, a result of the festivities preceding the wedding. And the women were no better than the men. When a Russian lady entertained her friends, it was etiquette to send round afterwards to know if they all got home safely. Yet one traveller unconsciously gives the Muscovite's own point of view: there was a quarter of Moscow known as the "drunken" quarter: that was where the foreign soldiers lodged.

The excessive misuse of tobacco was also bound to be noticed, considering that smoking became general more quickly there than anywhere else outside England and Turkey. But the Tsar who failed to check drunkenness succeeded against smoking, which he prohibited, under penalty of slitting the nostrils, in 1634, on the ground of it being a frequent cause of fires among the houses, all wooden ones, and of the unholy state of the Muscovite's breath when he addressed the saints.

Along with other accusations which the travellers have to lodge, such as that of a grossness of indecency without parallel in their experience, is hardly to be found one note of pleasure, except with regard to the charm of the Russian spring. It may be doubted if foreigners' opinions underwent much change until such writers as Turgenev compelled attention to the point of creating sympathy. But yet, if their tales be few and their enjoyment scanty, their records possess all the greater comparative value from the very fact of their fewness. That the pre-Christian Slav religion still remained in memory, if not in use, at Pskov as late as 1590 would probably never even have been guessed but for the remark of one Johann David Wunderer, who was there at that date, that he saw two stone statues there, one holding a cross, the other standing on a snake with a sword in one hand and fire in the other, idols, he was told, who were still known as "Ussladt" and "Corsa."[61]

PART III
THE MISUNDERSTOOD WEST

Starting from the southwest corner of France, the most direct way was taken for the Escorial and Madrid, whence the return journey led past Barcelona to Montserrat and so over the Pyrenees again to the southeast corner of France. The objective, of course, was the capital and the court. And it was taken for granted, here as elsewhere, that the other chief objects of interest were the towns, which claimed an even greater proportion of attention than in other countries, inasmuch as the hardships of travel in Spain were more trying to a foreigner than those experienced elsewhere, and his mental energies were often, in consequence, the less free for observation in Spain as long as he kept on the move. Now it unfortunately happened that the seamy side of Spanish life thrust itself to the front in undue proportion in the towns. Moreover, the French districts which lay nearest to Spain were those whose characteristics contrasted most favourably as against those of the Spanish districts that lay nearest to France. The liveliness and gaiety of the Bayonnais, playing bowls all day on the carefully levelled, sanded court between his house and the street, was thrown into relief by the sternness of the Pyrenees and the poverty and gloom of the Vizcaino.

The injustice done by these first impressions was deepened by almost all that caught the attention on a journey like that just outlined, whatever the momentary point of view, whether historical, geographical, social, superficial, or political,—especially political.

The Spanish king was looked on as the most powerful Christian monarch of the time, in prestige, in financial resources, and as the head of an empire whose limits were the more impressive for being mathematicians' lines imagined in the midst of the Unexplored. It was natural, then, to consider his capital the centre of each, as well as of all, of his dominions, and as the Holy of Holies of European kingship; and this, too, at a date when monarchical ideals were so strong that a highly respectable middle-class man like William Camden could allude to Simon de Montfort, who figures in modern school-books as the ever-glorious founder of "representative" government, as—"our Catiline."[62] In addition, the annexation of Portugal in 1580, and its revolt in 1640, accentuate such ideas more in this period than in any other as the only one during which the whole peninsula was under one king.

Neither was this illusion of solidarity merely a traveller's mirage which those on the spot would rectify. Philip II's people loved to have it so; witness one of Sancho Panza's favourite proverbs: "Un rey, Una fe, Una ley"; and how was the tourist to know that the Spaniard did not appreciate his differentiation between ideals and facts? The voice of Sancho Panza is, of course, the voice of Castile, but then Castile has always the monopoly of forming foreign, and leading Spanish, opinion on things Spanish.