Descartes, who chose Amsterdam as the place in which to think out his philosophy, praised it as the ideal retreat for students, contending that it was far better for them than Italy, with its plagues, heat, unwholesome evenings, murder and robbery.[289] Locke, when he went into voluntary exile in 1684, enjoyed himself with the doctors and men of letters in Amsterdam, attending by special invitation of the principal physician of the city the dissection of a lioness, or discussing knotty problems of theology with the wealthy Quaker merchants.[290] Courtiers were charmed with the sea-shore at Scheveningen, where on the hard sand, admirably contrived by nature for the divertisement of persons of quality, the foreign ambassadors and their ladies, and the society of the Hague, drove in their coaches and six horses.[291] However, Sir William Temple, after some years spent as Ambassador to the Netherlands, decided that Holland was a place where a man would choose rather to travel than to live, because it was a country where there was more sense than wit, more wealth than pleasure, and where one would find more persons to esteem than to love.[292]

Holland was of peculiar delight to the traveller of the seventeenth century because it contained so many curiosities and rareties.  To ferret out objects of vertu the Jacobean gentleman would take any journey.  People with cabinets of butterflies, miniatures, shells, ivory, or Indian beads, were pestered by tourists asking to see their treasures.[293] No garden was so entrancing to them as one that had “a rupellary nidary"[294] or an aviary with eagles, cranes, storks, bustards, ducks with four wings, or with rabbits of an almost perfect yellow colour.[295] Holland, therefore, where ships brought precious curiosities from all over the world, was a heaven for the virtuoso.  Evelyn in Rotterdam hovered between his delight in the brass statue of Erasmus and a pelican, which he carefully describes.  The great charm of Dutch inns for Sam Paterson was their hoards of China and Japan ware and the probability you had of meeting a purring marmot, a squeaking guinea-pig, or a tame rabbit with a collar of bells, hopping through the house.[296]

But we have dwelt too long, perhaps, on those who voyaged to see knick-knacks, and to gain accomplishments at French academies.  Though the academies were characteristic of the seventeenth century, there were other centres of education sought by Englishmen abroad.  The study of medicine, particularly, took many students to Padua or Paris, for the Continent was far ahead of England in scientific work.[297] Sir Thomas Browne’s son studied anatomy at Padua with Sir John Finch, who had settled there and was afterwards chosen syndic of the university.[298] At Paris Martin Lister, though in the train of the English Ambassador, principally enjoyed “Mr Bennis in the dissecting-room working by himself upon a dead body,” and “took more pleasure to see Monsieur Breman in his white waistcoat digging in the royal physic-garden and sowing his couches, than Mounsieur de Saintot making room for an ambassador”:  and found himself better disposed and more apt to learn the names and physiognomy of a hundred plants, than of five or six princes.[299]