“And lately at Paris (as they tell us) when the Spanish Hostages were to be entertayned, he did Usher it in the great Chamber, as he had done here before; and espying the Chayre not to stand well under the State, mended it handsomely himselfe, and then set him downe to give them audience."[220]

Nor can Dallington conceal his disapproval of foreign food.  The sorrows of the beef-eating Englishman among the continentals were always poignant.  Dallington is only one of the many travellers who, unable to grasp the fact that warmer climes called for light diet, reproached the Italians especially for their “parsimony and thin feeding.”  In Henry the Eighth’s time there was already a saying among the Italians, “Give the Englishman his beef and mustard,"[221] while the English in turn jibed at the Italians for being “like Nebuchadnezzar,—­always picking of sallets.”  “Herbage,” says Dallington scornfully “is the most generall food of the Tuscan ... for every horse-load of flesh eaten, there is ten cart loades of hearbes and rootes, which also their open Markets and private tables doe witnesse, and whereof if one talke with them fasting, he shall have sencible feeling."[222] The whole subject of diet he dismisses in his advice to a traveller as follows:  “As for his viands I feare not his surfetting; his provision is never so great, but ye may let him loose to his allowance....  I shall not need to tell him before what his dyet shall be, his appetite will make it better than it is:  for he shall be still kept sharpe:  only of the difference of dyets, he shall observe thus much:  that of Germanie is full or rather fulsome; that of France allowable; that of Italie tolerable; with the Dutch he shall have much meat ill-dressed:  with the French lesse, but well handled; with the Italian neither the one nor the other."[223]

Though there is much in Dallington’s description of Italy and France to repay attention, our concern is with his Method for Travell,[224] which, though more practical than the earlier Elizabethan essays of the same sort, opens in the usual style of exhortation: 

“Plato, one of the day-starres of that knowledge, which then but dawning hath since shone out in clearer brightness, thought nothing better for the bettering our understanding then Travell:  as well by having a conference with the wiser sort in all sorts of learning, as by the [Greek:  Autopsiaei].  The eye-sight of those things, which otherwise a man cannot have but by Tradition; A Sandy foundation either in matter of Science, or Conscience.  So that a purpose to Travell, if it be not ad voluptatem Solum, sed ad utilitatem, argueth an industrious and generous minde.  Base and vulgar spirits hover still about home:  those are more noble and divine, that imitate the Heavens, and joy in motion.”