nd the
eighteenth century was as noticeable as any other for the "mal du pays"
which attacked young men, but travel became the tour of curiosity and
diversion with which we are familiar, and not an earnest endeavour to
become "a compleat person." Many changes helped this decadence. The
"policy" of Italy and France, which once attracted the embryo statesmen
of Elizabeth, was now well known and needed no further study. With the
passing of the Stuarts, when the king's favour ceased to be the means of
making one's fortune, a courtly education was no longer profitable. High
offices under the Georges were as often as not filled by unpolished
Englishmen extolled for their native flavour of bluntness and bluffness.
Foreign graces were a superfluous ornament, more or less ridiculous. The
majority of Englishmen were wont to prize, as Sam Johnson did, "their
rustic grandeur and their surly grace," and to join in his lament:

"Lost in thoughtless ease and empty show,
Behold the warrior dwindled to a beau;
Sense, freedom, piety refined away,
Of France the mimick and of Spain the prey."[383]

A large section of society was inimical to the kind of education that
the Earl of Chesterfield prescribed for his son. The earl was well aware
of it, indeed, and marked with repugnance divers young bucks of his day
with leathern breeches and unpowdered hair, who would exclaim; "Damn
these finical outlandish airs, give me a manly resolute manner. They
make a rout with their graces, and talk like a parcel of dancing
masters, and dress like a parcel of fops; one good Englishman will beat
three of them."[384]

Even during the height of the Grand Tour in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, thoughtful minds, observing the effects of a
foreign education as seen not only in the courtiers of Charles II., but
in the dozens of obscure country gentlemen who painfully sought to
acquire the habit of a Parisian Marquis by education abroad, noticed the
weak points of such a system. The Earl of Clarendon thought it
pernicious to send boys abroad until after they had gone through Oxford
or Cambridge. There was no necessity for their getting the French accent
at an early age, "as if we had no mind to be suspected to be
Englishmen." That took them from their own country at just the age when
they ought to have severe mental discipline, for the lack of which no
amount of social training would make them competent men. "They return
from trav