INTRODUCTORY
religion and morals. The foundation of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1592, was justified on the ground 'that many of our people have usually heretofore used to travel into France, Italy, and Spain, to get learning in such foreign universities, whereby they have been infected with popery and other ill qualities.'[1] But the usage of youthful peregrination was barely affected by such suspicions. The young Englishman's educational tour often extended to Italy and Germany as well as to France, but France was rarely omitted, and many youths confined their excursions to French territory."[2]
After the reign of Elizabeth the stream of travel to foreign parts, in spite of occasional interruption by Continental wars, continued to flow; and what came to be known as "the grand tour"[3] attained in the eighteenth century a more widely diffused popularity than it had ever before known. Ever since the Renaissance the tide of travel — particularly to Italy — from various countries of Europe had ebbed and flowed. But in the eighteenth century what had been a few generations earlier a matter of extreme difficulty, and even danger, became relatively easy. Annoyance and privation might still be expected here and there, but not in sufficient measure to deter one in tolerable health from the undertaking.
This growing interest of Englishmen in foreign countries, especially France and Italy and the Low Countries, and, to some degree, Germany, was due to a multitude of causes: to the centering of attention upon the Continent by the War of the Spanish Succession and other conflicts, to the popularity of French fashions notwithstanding the traditional hostility to France, to the greater perfection of means of transportation, to the increase of foreign commerce, to the rapidly growing wealth and broadening outlook of Englishmen, and to the multitudinous attractions of the Continent — social, artistic, architectural, literary, historical — which were sufficient to draw tourists of every taste, whether for enlarging their stock of knowledge or for mere pleasure.
2
- ↑ J. W. Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin (1889), p. 354.
- ↑ S. Lee, The French Renaissance in England, pp. 42, 43.
- ↑ The first instance of the use of the term recorded in the Oxford Dictionary is for the year 1670.
