epartment at Columbia University I owe
the gratitude of one who has received her earliest inclination to
scholarship from their teachings. I am under heavy obligations to
Professor A.H. Thorndike and Professor G.P. Krapp for their corrections
and suggestions in the proof-sheets of this book, and to Professor W.P.
Trent for continued help and encouragement throughout my studies at
Columbia and elsewhere.

Above all, I wish to emphasize the aid of Professor C.H. Firth, of
Oxford University, whose sympathy and comprehension of the difficulties
of a beginner in the field he so nobly commands can be understood only
by those, like myself, who come to Oxford aspiring and alone. I wish
this essay were a more worthy result of his influence.

CLARE HOWARD

BARNARD COLLEGE, NEW YORK

_October_ 1913

* * * * *

INTRODUCTION

Among the many didactic books which flooded England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were certain essays on travel. Some of these have
never been brought to light since their publication more than three
hundred years ago, or been mentioned by the few writers who have
interested themselves in the literature of this subject. In the
collections of voyages and explorations, so often garnered, these have
found no place. Most of them are very rare, and have never been
reprinted. Yet they do not deserve to be thus overlooked, and in several
ways this survey of them will, I think, be useful for students of
literature.

They reveal a widespread custom among Elizabethan and Jacobean
gentlemen, of completing their education by travel. There are scattered
allusions to this practice, in contemporary social documents: Anthony a
Wood frequently explains how such an Oxonian "travelled beyond seas and
returned a compleat Person,"--but nowhere is this ideal of a
cosmopolitan education so explicitly set forth as it is in these essays.
Addressed to the intending tourist, they are in no sense to be confused
with guide-books or itineraries. They are discussions of the benefits of
travel, admonitions and warnings, arranged to put the traveller in the
proper attitude of mind towards his great task of self-development.
Taken in chronological order they outline for us the life of the
travelling student.

Beginning with the end of the sixteenth century when travel became the
fashion, as the only means of acquiring modern languages and modern
history, as well as those physica