ABSTRACT
Travel, for Bacon, is in other words like the reading of an essay or a book: with the correct tutelage, one can abridge the experience, extracting its salient features and returning home all the sooner to apply one’s travels to profitable gain. Evidence of his recent travels should ‘appear rather in his discourse than his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories’ (p. 48). By distilling his experience abroad, the young man may put his travels to good use in the furthering of his career, impressing others with his sophistication without appearing like an alien or a bore. One of Thomas Overbury’s characters, ‘An Affectate Traveller’, typifies the smugness that Bacon warns against: he is ‘a speaking fashion; hee hath taken paines to be ridiculous, and hath seene more then he hath perceived … his gate cryes, Behold me … his discourse sounds big, but meanes nothing … [he] preferreth all Countries before his owne.’2 Tasteful discretion is the key to avoiding the scorn this figure incites: ‘let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country’ (‘Of Travel’, p. 48).
