to Goa took thirteen
months. Inns were good in France and England; less pleasant elsewhere.
Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, where a large living
and dining room would be heated to a high temperature by a stove around
which travelers would dry their steaming garments. The smells caused
by those operations, together with the fleas and mice with which the
poorer inns were infested, made the stay anything but luxurious. Any
complaint was met by the retort, "If you don't like it, go somewhere
else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the traveller was
escorted to his bedroom, he found it very cold in winter, though the
featherbeds kept him warm enough. He would see his chamber filled with
other beds occupied by his travelling companions of both {500} sexes,
and he himself was often forced to share his bed with a stranger. The
custom of the time was to take one bath a week. For this there were
public bath-houses, [Sidenote: Baths] frequented by both sexes. A
common form of entertainment was the "bath-party."

[Sidenote: Sports]

With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed in other matters the
contemporaries of Luther and Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never
has the theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear-baiting and
bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also much relished, though
humane men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful
beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were
250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in
that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden
balls and "bats"--as racquets are still called in England--were much
harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called
"triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played
nearly as now.

Young people loved dances and some older people shook their heads over
them, then as now. Melanchthon danced, at the age of forty-four, and
Luther approved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a means of
bringing young people together. On the other hand dances were
regulated in many states and prohibited in others, like Zurich and
Geneva. Some of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others
were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, embraced and
whirled around giddily by their partners. The Scotch ambassador's
comment that Queen Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an