abnegatory spirit on the voyage, he is to be at pains to secure a berth in the middle of the ship, and not to mind paying fifty ducats for to be in a good honest place, “to have your ease in the galey and also to be cherysshed.”  Still more unchristian are the injunctions to run ahead of one’s fellows, on landing, in order to get the best quarters at the inn, and first turn at the dinner provided; and above all, at Port Jaffa, to secure the best ass, “for ye shall paye no more for the best than for the worste.”

But while this book was being published, new forces were at hand which were to strip the thin disguise of piety from pilgrims of this sort.  The Colloquies of Erasmus appeared before the third edition of Informacon for Pylgrymes, and exploded the idea that it was the height of piety to have seen Jerusalem.  It was nothing but the love of change, Erasmus declared, that made old bishops run over huge spaces of sea and land to reach Jerusalem.  The noblemen who flocked thither had better be looking after their estates, and married men after their wives.  Young men and women travelled “non sine gravi discrimine morum et integritatis.”  Pilgrimages were a dissipation.  Some people went again and again and did nothing else all their lives long.[6] The only satisfaction they looked for or received was entertainment to themselves and their friends by their remarkable adventures, and ability to shine at dinner-tables by recounting their travels.[7] There was no harm in going sometimes, but it was not pious.  And people could spend their time, money and pains on something which was truly pious.[8]

It was only a few years after this that that pupil of Erasmus and his friends, King Henry the Eighth, who startled Europe by the way he not only received new ideas but acted upon them, swept away the shrines, burned our Lady of Walsingham and prosecuted “the holy blisful martyr” Thomas a Becket for fraudulent pretensions.[9]

But a new object for travel was springing up and filling the leading minds of the sixteenth century—­the desire of learning, at first hand, the best that was being thought and said in the world.  Humanism was the new power, the new channel into which men were turning in the days when “our naturell, yong, lusty and coragious prynce and sovrayne lord King Herre the Eighth entered into the flower of pleasaunt youthe."[10] And as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage.

All through the fifteenth century the universities of Italy, pre-eminent since their foundation for secular studies, had been gaining reputation by their offer of a wider education than the threadbare discussions of the schoolmen.  The discovery and revival in the fifteenth century of Greek literature, which had stirred Italian society so profoundly, gave to the universities a northward-spreading fame.  Northern scholars, like Rudolf Agricola, hurried south to find congenial air at the centre of intellectual life.  That professional humanists could not do without the stamp of true culture which an Italian degree gave to them, Erasmus, observer of all things, notes in the year 1500 to the Lady of Veer: