huge, monstrous Excrescences of Nature, bearing nothing but
craggy stones."[399]

With the decline of enthusiasm over the serious advantages of travel,
there was not much demand for those essays on the duties of the student
abroad which we have tried to describe. By the eighteenth century,
hand-books for travellers were much the same as those with which we are
to-day familiar; that is, a guide-book describing the particular objects
to be inspected, and the sensations they ought to inspire, together with
exceedingly careful notes as to the price of meals and transportation.
This sort of manual became necessary when travel grew to be the
recreation of men of moderate education who could not read the local
guide-books written in the language of the country they visited.
Compilations such as the _Itinerarium Italiae_ of Schottus, published at
Antwerp in 1600, and issued in eleven editions during the seventeenth
century, had been sufficient for the accomplished traveller of the
Renaissance.[400] France, as the centre of travel, produced the greatest
number of handy manuals,[401] and it was from these, doubtless, that
Richard Lassels drew the idea of composing a similar work in the English
language, which would comprise the exhortation to travel, in the manner
of Turler, with a continental guide to objects of art. _The Voyage of
Italy_ by Lassels, published in Paris in 1670, marks the beginning of
guide-books in English.

Still, in succeeding vade-mecums there are some occasional echoes of the
old injunctions to improve one's time. Misson's _A New Voyage to
Italy_,[402] maps out some intellectual duties. According to Misson a
voyager ought to carry along with him a cane divided into several
measures, or a piece of pack-thread well twined and waxed, fifty fathom
long and divided into feet by knots, so as to be able to measure the
height of the towers and the bigness of pillars and the dimensions of
everything so far as he is able. This seems sufficiently laborious, but
it makes for an easy life compared to the one prescribed by Count
Leopold Berchtold in his _Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of
Patriotic Travellers_. He would have one observe the laws and customs of
foreigners with a curiosity that would extend to every department of
social and economic life, beginning with "Causes of the Decrease of
Population and Remedies to prevent them"; proceeding to such matters as
the state of the peasantry; to questions appli