However, allowing your lordship to make the most of these respectable authorities for the use of travelling, it must still be remembered, that they are wide of our present purpose. They were _Sages_, that travelled: and we are now inquiring, whether this be the way for young men to _become_ Sages. PLATO might pick up more learning in his Voyages, than any body since has been able to understand; and yet a youth of eighteen be little the wiser for staring away two or three years in mysterious _Egypt_.
Why, truly, if he carried nothing abroad with him but the use of his eye-sight, I should be much of your mind with regard to the improvements he might be expected to bring back with him. But let him hear and observe a little, as well as see; and methinks a youth of eighteen might pick up something of value, though he should not return laden with the mysteries of _Egypt_.
As to the gaiety on the ancient Sages, I could be much entertained with it, if I did not recollect that the more enlightened moderns have, also, been of their mind in this instance. To say nothing of other countries, which yet have risen in reputation for knowledge and civility in proportion to their acquaintance with the neighbouring nations, surely it must be allowed of our _own_, that all its valuable acquisitions in both have been forwarded at least, if not occasioned, by this reasonable practice. We are now, without doubt, arrived at the summit of politeness, and may subsist at length upon our own proper stock. But was this always the case? And must it not be acknowledged, that the brightest periods of our story are those, in which our noble youth were fashioned in the school of foreign Travel? You will hardly pretend that the ornaments of the second CHARLES’ and ELIZABETH’S courts were cast in the coarse mould of this _home-breeding_.
I shall perhaps carry my pretensions still further, and affirm it had been much better if they had been so.
I know what is to be said for the voyagers in ELIZABETH’S time. We were just then emerging from ignorance and barbarity. Learning and the Arts were but then getting up; and were best acquired, we will say, in foreign schools, and the commerce of other nations, which might have the start of us in such improvements. The state of _Europe_ at that time was not unlike what I observed of the old world, when knowledge was in few hands, and the exclusive property, as it were, of particular persons. So that it was to be travelled for, and fetched home, by such as would have it. _Italy_, in particular, was in those days, as it had long been, the theatre of politeness, and without doubt could furnish us with very much of the learning we most wanted.