countrymen.  Almost the only book Sir Edward Unton seems to have brought back with him from Venice was the Historie of Nicolo Machiavelli, Venice, 1537.  On the title page he has written:  “Macchavelli Maxima / Qui nescit dissimulare / nescit vivere / Vive et vivas / Edw.  Unton. "[120] Perhaps it was only his display of Italian clothes—­“civil, because black, and comely because fitted to the body,"[121] or daintier table manners than Englishmen used which called down upon him the ridicule of his enemies.  No doubt there was in the returned traveller a certain degree of condescension which made him disagreeable—­especially if he happened to be a proud and insolent courtier, who attracted the Queen’s notice by his sharpened wits and novelties of discourse, or if he were a vain boy of the sort that cumbered the streets of London with their rufflings and struttings.

In making surmises as to whom Ascham had in his mind’s eye when he said that he knew men who came back from Italy with “less learning and worse manners,” I guessed that one might be Arthur Hall, the first translator of Homer into English.  Hall was a promising Grecian at Cambridge, and began his translation with Ascham’s encouragement.[122] Between 1563 and 1568, when Ascham was writing The Scolemaster, Hall, without finishing for a degree, or completing the Homer, went to Italy.  It would have irritated Ascham to have a member of St John’s throw over his task and his degree to go gadding.  Certainly Hall’s after life bore out Ascham’s forebodings as to the value of foreign travel.  On his return he spent a notorious existence in London until the consequences of a tavern brawl turned him out of Parliament.  I might dwell for a moment on Hall’s curious account of this latter affair, because it is one of the few utterances we have by an acknowledged Italianate Englishman—­of a certain sort.

Hall, apparently, was one of those gallants who ruffled about Elizabethan London and used

    “To loove to play at Dice
    To sware his blood and hart
    To face it with a Ruffins look
    And set his Hat athwart."[123]

The humorists throw a good deal of light on such “yong Jyntelmen.”  So does Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, to whom they used to run when they were arrested for debt, or for killing a carman, making as their only apology, “I am a Jyntelman, and being a Jyntelman, I am not thus to be used at a slave and a colion’s hands."[124] Hall, writing in the third person, in the assumed character of a friend, describes himself as “a man not wholly unlearned, with a smacke of the knowledge of diverse tongues ... furious when he is contraried ... as yourselfe is witnesse of his dealings at Rome, at Florence, in the way between that and Bollonia ... so implacable if he conceyve an injurie, as Sylla will rather be pleased with Marius, than he with his equals, in a maner for offences grown of tryffles....  Also spending more tyme in sportes, and following the same, than is any way commendable, and the lesse, bycause, I warrant you, the summes be great are dealte for.” [125]