s Kingdom." So runs the text of a Palladian title-page,
surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a _vera effigies_ of
Tom himself. He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five
or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long,
like that of our present-day young men.

The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and
took up their battledores. Their gibes and quirks are all printed in
my edition, and are better reading than the book itself. Coryat was a
cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence. A rule of his was: "Never
use one adjective if three will do." So far as I know he was the first
Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless
Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in
travelling and writing about it. But I think it more probable that
Moryson went abroad to improve his mind. I don't think Coryat had any
notion of that. Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any
case there can be no comparison between them. Moryson is thorough,
Coryat is not. Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was
a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a
euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that
Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid--he called himself a friend of
Ben Jonson's--and took the best of him. You will find him in _Love's
Labour's Lost_ as well as in _All's Well_. For a foretaste of his
quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which
fills a page: "I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in
the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais ...
about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the
exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my
tumultuous stomach...." There is more about it, but that will do.
Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.

Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment,
not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in
Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I,
Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of
the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri
IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the
Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua,
to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gond