26 THE AGE OF REASON
There travelled with the agent of an English shipping company
a party of Swabian emigrants, wives, dogs, children and all, who
wanted to go to Pennsylvania; and pious, violent, and bawling
pilgrims from Lower Bavaria on the way to Rome; there travelled,
with a rapacious, sharp, observant eye on everything, the re-
quisitioners of silver, cattle, and grain for the Viennese War
Treasury, and discharged Imperial soldiers from the Turkish
wars, and charlatans and alchemists and beggars and young
gentlemen with their tutors journeying from Flanders to
Venice.
They all swept forward, backward, and across, came to a
standstill, spurred on, stumbled, trotted easily, cursed the bad
roads, laughed bitterly or with good-natured mockery at the
slowness of the stage, growled at the worn-out hacks, the ram-
shackle vehicles. They all poured on, ebbed back, gossiped,
prayed, whored, blasphemed, shrank in fear, exulted, and lived.1
One such poor man who travelled and earned a living in
many countries of Europe was Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754).
Goldsmith, who seems to have been inspired by Holberg's
story himself to set forth penniless over Europe, narrates it
in An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning:
The history of polite learning in Denmark may be comprised
in the life of one single man: it rose and fell with the late famous
Baron Holberg. This was, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary
personages that has done honour to the present century. His
being the son of a private sentinel did not abate the ardour of
his ambition, for he learned to read, though without a master.
Upon the death of his father, being left entirely destitute, he
was involved in all that distress which is common among the
poor, and of which the great have scarcely any idea. However,
thoogjx bdy a boy of nine years old, he still persisted in pursuing
his studies, travelled about from school to school and begged his
learning and his bread. When at the age of seventeen, instead
of applying himself to any of the lower occupations, which seem
best adapted to such circumstances, he was resolved to travel
far improvement from Norway, the place of his birth, to Copen-
1 L> Feucbtwanger, Jem Suss, adinb. (trans. Muir, 1926). Quoted by kind
pOTBttssio^ of Mr Martin Seeker.