Rome) is in Padua, under il
Sordo."[240] Italy, it may be observed, was still the best school for
these accomplishments. Pluvinel was soon to make a world-renowned riding
academy in Paris, but the art of fencing was more slowly disseminated.
One was still obliged, like Captain Bobadil, to make "long travel for
knowledge, in that mystery only."[241] Brantome says the fencing masters
of Italy kept their secrets in their own hands, giving their services
only on the condition that you should never reveal what you had learnt
even to your dearest friends. Some instructors would never allow a
living soul in the room where they were giving lessons to a pupil. And
even then they used to keek everywhere, under the beds, and examine the
wall to see if it had any crack or hole through which a person could
peer.[242] Dallington makes no further remark on the subject, however,
than the above, and after some advice about money matters, which we will
mention in another connection, and a warning to the traveller that his
apparel must be in fashion--for the fashions change with trying
rapidity, and the French were very scornful of anyone who appeared in a
last year's suit[243]--he brings to a close one of the pithiest essays
in our collection.

When the influence of France over the ideals of a gentleman was well
established, James Howell wrote his _Instructions for Forreine
Travell_,[244] and in this book for the first time the traveller is
advised to stay at one of the French academies--or riding schools, as
they really were.

His is the best known, probably, of all our treatises, partly because it
was reprinted a little while ago by Mr Gosse, and partly because of its
own merits. Howell had an easier, more indulgent outlook upon the world
than Dallington, and could see all nations with equal humour--his own
included. Take his comparison of the Frenchman and the Spaniard.

The Frenchman "will dispatch the weightiest affairs as hee walke along
in the streets, or at meales, the other upon the least occasion of
businesse will retire solemnly to a room, and if a fly chance to hum
about him, it will discompose his thoughts and puzzle him: It is a kind
of sicknesse for a Frenchman to keep a secret long, and all the drugs of
Egypt cannot get it out of a Spaniard.... The Frenchman walks fast, (as
if he had a Sergeant always at his heels,) the Spaniard slowly, as if
hee were newly come out of some quartan Ague; the French go up and down
the s