THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
a professed Gamester being the most advantageous character a Man can have at Paris. The Abbés indeed and men of learning are a People of easy access enough, but few English that travel have knowledge enough to take any great pleasure in this Company, at least our present lot of travellers have not."[1]
In our day many English travelers speak French and German, and sometimes Italian and Spanish, with fluency and tolerable accuracy, but even yet the average Englishman's lack of facility in any foreign tongue is proverbial. He can with difficulty forget himself, and he unwillingly submits to the humiliation attendant upon learning a new language. In the eighteenth century many young English tourists intended to learn no language but their own — and they succeeded admirably. Proud-spirited and unwilling to put themselves at a disadvantage before strangers, they ignored as far as they could the fact that they were living amidst the users of a language not their own. On the other hand, well-educated tourists commonly spoke a tolerable imitation of French, and a polished man of society like George Selwyn was as much at home in French as in English. "Voltaire declares," says Leslie Stephen, "that Bolingbroke — one of whose early essays was published in French — spoke French with unsurpassed energy and precision. The young nobleman on his grand tour was easily admitted with his tutor to French society, and it is enough to mention the names of Horace Walpole, Hume, and Adam Smith, to suggest the importance of the relations which sometimes sprang up."[2]
The popularity of the Italian tour induced many Englishmen to pick up some knowledge of the Italian language and literature. The young Earl of Carlisle, writing to Selwyn from Turin in 1765, says:[3] "I am learning Spanish and Italian, and read a great deal."[4] And three years later, writing from Rome, he says: "I read Italian pretty well: speaking I have little occasion for. I think I am a good deal improved in my French."[5]
Of Charles James Fox we are told: He "was an excellent
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