THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
active young animal of whom he had rashly assumed the charge. We rarely hear complaints that a tutor deliberately led his pupil astray, but he commonly drove with a very loose rein. Horace Walpole had no high opinion of tutors as a class, nor, for that matter, of the troops of traveling boys who invaded the galleries of Florence and flung their money about the streets of Rome. Writing to Horace Mann he says: "The absurdities which English travelling boys are capable of, and likely to act or conceive, always gave me apprehension of your meeting with disagreeable scenes — and then there is another animal still more absurd than Florentine men or English boys, and that is, travelling governors, who are mischievous into the bargain, and whose pride is always hurt because they are sure of its never being indulged. They will not leave the world, because they are sent to teach it, and as they come far the more ignorant of it than their pupils, take care to return with more prejudices, and as much care to instill all theirs into their pupils."[1] Similar flings abound in his later letters. In 1754 he writes to Mann: "I am glad you have got my Lord of Cork. He is, I know, a very worthy man, and though not a bright man, nor a man of the world, much less a good author, yet it must be comfortable to you now and then to see something besides travelling children, booby governors, and abandoned women of quality."[2] Before going to Paris, in 1765, he wrote to George Montagu: "Though they (the Richmonds) are in a manner my children, I do not intend to adopt the rest of my countrymen; nor, when I quit the best company here, to live in the worst there; such are young travelling boys, and, what is still worse, old travelling boys, governors."[3] And again in 1768 he remarks in a letter to Mann: "We expect our cousin and brother of Denmark next week; — since he will travel, I hope he will improve: I doubt there is room for it. He is much, I believe, of the stamp of many youths we have sent you; but with so much a better chance, that he has not a travelling tutor to make him more absurd than he would be of himself."[4]
122
