ola on the
Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an
imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and
sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey
to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's
quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative.
Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That
most sweet Paradise, that _domicilium Venerum et Charitum_," did
so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would
desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some
divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their
grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the
love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I
preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places
under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose
"incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints--Venice
beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should
"foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered
him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone
without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He
was afraid to risk it.

When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of
Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.

The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.

If any aske in verse what soar I at?
My Muse replies The praise of Coryat----

so John Gyfford begins,

A work that will eternise thee till God come
And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe----

so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels,
and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the
bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:

Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.

--the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of

What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europe's world he can discover?

The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be
pleased with that.

In 1615 he made a much