2796124014

A CAMBRIDGE DON AND HIS COMPANIONS IN THE BALKANS (1794) : SOME UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE OF ROBERT STOCKDALE, J.B.S. MORRITT AND RANDLE WILBRAHAM

ERIC D. TAPPE and TREVOR J. HOPE

(London)

In his essay “Of Travel” Francis Bacon (1561—1626) wrote: ‘‘Travel, in the younger sort is a part of education : in the elder, a part of experience”. From that time up to the middle years of the nineteenth centnry and the advent of mass travel, a journey to the continent was an essential part of any well-bred young man’s education. Until the eighteenth century ItaJy was the particular object of British travellers; for, as Kichard Lassels put it : “No man understands Livy and Caesar like him who hath madę exactly the Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy.”¹ The classical education of the eighteenth century reinforced the tendency of young travellers to see for themseh es the glories of ancient Greece and Korne. Indeed, so entrenched had this idea become by the end of the century, that no education could be deemed complete without the tour of the continent.

The Ottoman Empire began to enter the orbit of the British ‘grand tourists’ towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Sir Francis Dashwood madę a tour of Greece and Asia Minor which inspired the formation of the Dilettanti Society in 1732, founded to promote knowledge and understanding of classical art and taste in Britain.² ,An early member of this club "was the Earl of Sandwich, who in 1738 accompanied by several friends, the painter Liotard, and tutor, the Keverend John Cooke, visited the Near East.³ It was the Dilettanti Society who organised and spon-sored Kichard Chandler’s expedition to Greece and Asia Minor in 1764— 66.⁴ About the same time Dashwood’s godson, Frank Skipworth, travelled out to Greece and then via Constantinople across Wallaehia and Moldavia to Warsaw.⁵ The extension to the traditional ¹ Grand Tour’ was under wav.

1

Quoted in Alan Hodge, ed., Yarieties of Traoel (London. 1967) pp. 3—4. See also W. E. Meade, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1914); Geof/rey Trease, The Grand Tour, (London, 1967) and Hugb Tregaskis, Beyond the Grand Tour. (London. 1979).

2

¹ Betty Kemp, Sir Francis Dashwood: An Eighteenth Century Independent (London, 1967) pp. 99-100.

3

   John Cooke, A Voyage performed by the late Earl of Sandwich... (London, 1799).

4

   Richard Chandler. Traoeis tn Asia Minor, or An Account of a Tour madę at the Ezpenst of the Society of Dilettanti (Oxford, 1775).

5

• See : Lionel Cust, Bisiory of the Society of Dilettanti (London, 1898).

REV. ŚTUDES SUD-EST EUROP., XVIII_I4, P. 591-615, BUCAREST. 1980