In London he set up for a wit, was enrolled in “The Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen,” who met at “The Sign of the Mere-maide in Bread Streete”; had John Donne and Ben Jonson among his convives, and may well have seen Shakespeare and heard him talk, if he did talk.  How he appeared himself we can only guess, but I conceive his position in the society to have been that of Polonius in the convocation of politic worms, as one, namely, where he was eaten rather than eating.  That, if it was so, may have determined him to make a name for himself by what was his strongest part, namely, his feet.

In 1608 he, the “Odcombian leg-stretcher,” did indeed travel “for five months, mostly on foot, from his native place of Odcombe in Somerset, through France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, Helvetia, some parts of High Germany, and the Netherlands, making in the whole 1975 miles.”  He started on the 14th May and was in London again on the 3rd October, and if indeed he did travel mostly on foot, I call it a very creditable performance.  The result was a book more talked of than read.  “Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months’ travels ... newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in his county of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdom.”  So runs the text of a Palladian title-page, surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a vera effigies of Tom himself.  He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long, like that of our present-day young men.

The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and took up their battledores.  Their gibes and quirks are all printed in my edition, and are better reading than the book itself.  Coryat was a cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence.  A rule of his was:  “Never use one adjective if three will do.”  So far as I know he was the first Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in travelling and writing about it.  But I think it more probable that Moryson went abroad to improve his mind.  I don’t think Coryat had any notion of that.  Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any case there can be no comparison between them.  Moryson is thorough, Coryat is not.  Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom.  Moryson was a student, Coryat a cockscomb.  Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a euphuist of the first water.  I haven’t the least doubt but that Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid—­he called himself a friend of Ben Jonson’s—­and took the best of him.  You will find him in Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as in All’s Well.  For a foretaste of his quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which fills a page:  “I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais ... about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach....”  There is more about it, but that will do.  Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.