returned from abroad, book-publishers thought it worth while to print
books addressed to travellers. At least, there grew up a demand for
advice to young men which became a feature of Elizabethan literature,
printed and unprinted. It was the convention for a young man about to
travel to apply to some experienced or elderly friend, and for that
friend to disburden a torrent of maxims after the manner of Polonius.
John Florio, who knew the humours of his day, represents this in a
dialogue in _Second Frutes_.[38] So does Robert Greene in _Greene's
Mourning Garment_.[39] What were at first the personal warnings of a
wise man to his young friend, such as Cecil's letter to Rutland, grew
into a generalized oration for the use of any traveller. Hence arose
manuals of instruction--marvellous little books, full of incitements to
travel as the duty of man, summaries of the leading characteristics of
foreigners, directions for the care of sore feet--and a strange medley
of matters.

Among the first essays of this sort are translations from Germanic
writers, with whom, if Turler is right, the book of precepts for travel
originated. For the Germans, with the English, were the most
indefatigable travellers of all nations. Like the English, they suddenly
woke up with a start to the idea that they were barbarians on the
outskirts of civilization, and like Chicago of the present day, sent
their young men "hustling for culture." They took up assiduously not
only the Renaissance ideal of travel as a highly educating experience,
by which one was made a complete man intellectually, but also the
Renaissance conviction that travel was a duty to the State. Since both
Germany and England were somewhat removed from the older and more
civilized nations, it was necessary for them to make an effort to learn
what was going on at the centre of the world. It was therefore the duty
of gentlemen, especially of noblemen, to whom the State would look to be