It Was Not The Populace Alone, Or Those Who Appealed Directly To The
Populace, Who Sneered At Popish Countries, And Pitied Them For Not Being
British.[381] As Time Went On Whigs Of All Classes Boasted Of The
Superiority Of England, Especially When They Travelled In Europe.
"We envy not the warmer clime that lies
In ten degrees of more indulgent skies ...
'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's Isle
And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile."[382]
Addison's travels are full of reflections of this sort. The destitution
of the Campagna of Rome demonstrates triumphantly what an aversion
mankind has to arbitrary government, while the well-populated mountain
of St Marino shows what a natural love they have for liberty. Whigs
abroad were well caricatured by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle in the
figures of the Painter and the Doctor. They observed that even the
horses and dogs in France were starved; whereupon the Governor of
Peregrine, an Oxonian and a Jacobite, sneered that they talked like true
Englishmen. The Doctor, affronted by the insinuation, told him with some
warmth that he was wrong in his conjecture, "his affections and ideas
being confined to no particular country; for he considered himself as a
citizen of the world. He owned himself more attached to England than to
any other kingdom, but this preference was the effect of reflection and
not of prejudice."
This growing conviction of England's superiority helped to bring about
the decadence of travel for education. Travel continued, and the
eighteenth century was as noticeable as any other for the "mal du pays"
which attacked young men, but travel became the tour of curiosity and
diversion with which we are familiar, and not an earnest endeavour to
become "a compleat person." Many changes helped this decadence. The
"policy" of Italy and France, which once attracted the embryo statesmen
of Elizabeth, was now well known and needed no further study. With the
passing of the Stuarts, when the king's favour ceased to be the means of
making one's fortune, a courtly education was no longer profitable. High
offices under the Georges were as often as not filled by unpolished
Englishmen extolled for their native flavour of bluntness and bluffness.
Foreign graces were a superfluous ornament, more or less ridiculous. The
majority of Englishmen were wont to prize, as Sam Johnson did, "their
rustic grandeur and their surly grace," and to join in his lament:
"Lost in thoughtless ease and empty show,
Behold the warrior dwindled to a beau;
Sense, freedom, piety refined away,
Of France the mimick and of Spain the prey."[383]
A large section of society was inimical to the kind of education that
the Earl of Chesterfield prescribed for his son. The earl was well aware
of it, indeed, and marked with repugnance divers young bucks of his day
with leathern breeches and unpowdered hair, who would exclaim; "Damn
these finical outlandish airs, give me a manly resolute manner. They
make a rout with their graces, and talk like a parcel of dancing
masters, and dress like a parcel of fops; one good Englishman will beat
three of them."[384]
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