Paul Hentzner, a tourist from Germany at precisely the same epoch, touches with equal minuteness on English characteristics.  It may be observed, that, with some discrepancies, there is also much similarity, in the views of the two critics.

“The English,” says the whimsical Paul, are serious, like the Germans, lovers of show, liking to be followed, wherever they go, by troops of servants, who wear their master’s arms, in silver, fastened to their left sleeves, and are justly ridiculed for wearing tails hanging down their backs.  They excel in dancing and music, for they are active and lively, although they are of thicker build than the Germans.  They cut their hair close on the forehead, letting it hang down on either side.  They are good sailors, and better pirates, cunning, treacherous, thievish.  Three hundred and upwards are hanged annually in London.  Hawking is the favourite sport of the nobility.  The English are more polite in eating than the French, devouring less bread, but more meat, which they roast in perfection.  They put a great deal of sugar in their drink.  Their beds are covered with tapestry, even those of farmers.  They are powerful in the field, successful against their enemies, impatient of anything like slavery, vastly fond of great ear-filling noises, such as cannon-firing, drum-beating, and bell-ringing; so that it is very common for a number of them, when they have got a cup too much in their heads, to go up to some belfry, and ring the bells for an hour together, for the sake of the amusement.  If they see a foreigner very well made or particularly handsome, they will say “’tis pity he is not an Englishman.”

It is also somewhat amusing, at the present day, to find a German elaborately explaining to his countrymen the mysteries of tobacco-smoking, as they appeared to his unsophisticated eyes in England.  “At the theatres and everywhere else,” says the traveller, “the English are constantly smoking tobacco in the following manner.  They have pipes, made on purpose, of clay.  At the further end of these is a bowl.  Into the bowl they put the herb, and then setting fire to it, they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels,” and so on; conscientious explanations which a German tourist of our own times might think it superfluous to offer to his compatriots.

It is also instructive to read that the light-fingered gentry of the metropolis were nearly as adroit in their calling as they are at present, after three additional centuries of development for their delicate craft; for the learned Tobias Salander, the travelling companion of Paul Hentzner, finding himself at a Lord Mayor’s Show, was eased of his purse, containing nine crowns, as skilfully as the feat could have been done by the best pickpocket of the nineteenth century, much to that learned person’s discomfiture.

Into such an England and among such English the Netherland envoys had now been despatched on their most important errand.