'Dr. Johnson was very angry with a gentleman at our house for not being
better company, and urged that he had travelled into Bohemia and seen
Prague. "Surely," added he, "the man who has seen Prague might tell us
something new and something strange, and not sit silent for want of
matter to put his lips in motion."' Piozzi's _Journey_, ii. 317.
All these passages shew, what indeed is evident enough from the text,
that it was not travelling in general but travelling between the ages of
nineteen and twenty-four, with a character unformed, a memory unstored,
and a judgment untrained, that Johnson attacked. It was a common habit
in his day to send young men of fortune to make the tour of Europe, as
it was called, at an age when they would now be sent to either Oxford or
Cambridge. Lord Charlemont was but eighteen when he left England. Locke,
at the end of his work on _Education_, said in 1692 much the same as
Johnson said in 1778.
'The ordinary time of travel,' he wrote, 'is from sixteen to one and
twenty.' He would send any one either at a younger age than sixteen
under a tutor, or at an older age than twenty-one without a tutor; 'when
he is of age to govern himself, and make observations of what he finds
in other countries worthy his notice ... and when, too, being thoroughly
acquainted with the laws and fashions, the natural and moral advantages
and defects of his own country, he has something to exchange with those
abroad, from whose conversation he hoped to reap any knowledge.'
Goldsmith, in his _Present State of Polite Learning_, ch. xiii, wrote in
1759:--
'We see more of the world by travel, but more of human nature by
remaining at home.... A youth just landed at the Brille resembles a
clown at a puppet-show; carries his amazement from one miracle to
another; from this cabinet of curiosities to that collection of
pictures; but wondering is not the way to grow wise.... The greatest
advantages which result to youth from travel are an easy address, the
shaking off national prejudices, and the finding nothing ridiculous in
national peculiarities. The time spent in these acquisitions could have
been more usefully employed at home.' Gibbon (_Misc. Works_, i. 197)
says that 'the previous and indispensable requisites of foreign travel
are age, judgment, a competent knowledge of men and books, and a freedom
from domestic prejudices.'
When he was only eighteen years old he saw the evils of early
travelling:--
'I never liked young travellers; they go too raw to make any great
remarks, and they lose a time which is (in my opinion) the most precious
part of a man's life.' _Ib_. p. 98.