an "English
Mounsieur" such as Sir Fopling Flutter, who "went to Paris a plain
bashful English Blockhead and returned a fine undertaking French
Fop."[378]

There had always been a protest against foreign influence, but in the
eighteenth century one cannot fail to notice a stronger and more
contemptuous attitude than ever before. England was feeling her power.
War with France sharpened the shafts of satire, and every victory over
the French increased a strong insular patriotism in all classes. Foote
declared residence in Paris a necessary part of every man of fashion's
education, because it "Gives 'em a relish for their own domestic
happiness and a proper veneration for their own national
liberties."[379] His Epilogue to _The Englishman in Paris_ commends the
prudence of British forefathers who

"Scorned to truck for base unmanly arts,
Their native plainness and their honest hearts."[380]

It was not the populace alone, or those who appealed directly to the
populace, who sneered at Popish countries, and pitied them for not being
British.[381] As time went on Whigs of all classes boasted of the
superiority of England, especially when they travelled in Europe.

"We envy not the warmer clime that lies
In ten degrees of more indulgent skies ...
'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's Isle
And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile."[382]

Addison's travels are full of reflections of this sort. The destitution
of the Campagna of Rome demonstrates triumphantly what an aversion
mankind has to arbitrary government, while the well-populated mountain
of St Marino shows what a natural love they have for liberty. Whigs
abroad were well caricatured by Smollett in _Peregrine Pickle_ in the
figures of the Painter and the Doctor. They observed that even the
horses and dogs in France were starved; whereupon the Governor of
Peregrine, an Oxonian and a Jacobite, sneered that they talked like true
Englishmen. The Doctor, affronted by the insinuation, told him with some
warmth that he was wrong in his conjecture, "his affections and ideas
being confined to no particular country; for he considered himself as a
citizen of the world. He owned himself more attached to England than to
any other kingdom, but this preference was the effect of reflection and
not of prejudice."

This growing conviction of England's superiority helped to bring about
the decadence of travel for education. Travel continued, a