Yet there is one defect of their travels which necessarily escaped notice at the time but cannot fail to strike any one now, which is, how much they passed by without a glance. It is commonly thought that the contrast of travel in days gone by with that of the later times is one of leisureliness as against universal effort to go "faster, farther, and higher" than one's neighbour. But the truth is that in what essentially characterises leisureliness in travelling, the leaving time and energy free for enjoying and studying places on the road, and still more, off it, they were more wanting than we. They went the greatest pace they could; where they stopped at the night they left at dawn; and overnight they had been too tired to explore amid the filth, the dangers, the darkness, the inextricable confusion, of a sixteenth-century town or hamlet. Yet if you call to mind the towns seen in passing which you recollect most vividly, most will probably be those in which your first walks happened after dark. And is there any Gothic cathedral, however grand, whose outside is not commonplace by day compared to its glory by night?
Moreover, the dearth of information narrowed not their opportunities merely, but their interests likewise. Carnac and Stonehenge were no doubt a long way out of their way, but the dolmen of Bagneux was no more than three-quarters of a mile from Saumur, where many of them stayed for weeks, or even months. Yet not a single one, apparently, went to see it. As for the opportunities, not only was Pompeii still buried for them, but Rome itself was, as Montaigne says, not so much ruins as a sepulchre of ruins. When, again, some one says of Lyons that the houses are fine but the streets so ill-smelling and dirty that one cannot stop to admire them, it may remind us that much that was nominally visible was practically invisible; whether through being what was, to them, a considerable distance off their routes, like Brou or Laon, or, as with most cathedrals, through houses being built up against them. Similarly, the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes is a case in point; houses having been erected inside it so freely that in 1682 five hundred men capable of bearing arms were supposed to be dwelling there.[161] And along with these conditions of living went ideas to correspond; the total effect being half-prohibitive of the occupations of the artist, the historian, and the archæologist, and this at a period when a larger proportion of the greatest buildings of Europe coexisted than at any other period. In fact, so far as the Loire châteaux are concerned, it is clear that the modern tourist sees far more of some of the finest Renascence work than did its contemporaries, who were restricted here to a visit to Chambord and a glimpse of the outsides of Blois and Amboise.