Through France and Italy and down the Adriatic to the Ionian Islands Lithgow journeys from Paris to Rome and Loretto – unimpressed by displays of Popish superstition there – favourable view of Venice and Genoa for their expelling the Jesuits and the Jews respectively – sea voyage from Venice down the Dalmatian coast to Ragusa and then to Corfu – encounter with Moorish corsairs – from the Ionian islands to Patras and Greece

Lithgow says nothing of his actual crossing of the Channel and land journey to Paris; the normal crossing at this time was from Dover or Rye to Calais or Dieppe, and the whole journey could take several days, depending on whether the winds in the Channel were favourable or adverse.1 It was March 1609 when Lithgow departed from Paris, apparently somewhat disillusioned with the crowded French capital. In ‘A comparison betweene London and Paris’ he stigmatizes the latter as admittedly populous, but as being

It is surprising that Lithgow at this point says nothing further about the French capital nor about his subsequent journey through France, since we have a plethora of information about such travels from other contemporary sources. With the peace and prosperity obtaining during Henry IV’s later years, numbers of British travellers, from sons of the aristocracy seeking culture and polish down to those seriously in quest of learning in the humanities or medicine, came to France, and from their travel accounts or from the numerous personal diaries and journals of both travellers and sojourners (mostly still in manuscript, with many of these to be found in such collections as the Bodleian and British Libraries), a good picture of France at this time, and its attractions for Britons, can be built up: hardly, however, from Lithgow’s writings. We get some idea of his critical attitude to France and the

French, with their ‘fantastick foolery’, from what he later wrote in the record of his third journey from Ireland to Spain, made through Paris and western France, and it is not Á attering (see below, pp. 156-57).