Clare Howard was the daughter of Alfred Digby & Caroline Sophia (Turner) Howard and the 1st cousin (once removed) of my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Agnes (Kennedy) Powers.
The preface revealed Clare Howard's activities:
This essay was written in 1908-1910 while I was studying at Oxford as Fellow of the Society of American Women in London.
To the Faculty of the English Department at Columbia University I owe the gratitude of one who has received her earliest inclination to scholarship from their teachings.
"Beginning with the end of the sixteenth century when travel became the fashion, as the only means of acquiring modern languages and modern history, as well as those physical accomplishments and social graces by which a young man won his way at Court, they trace his evolution up to the time when it had no longer any serious motive; that is, when the chairs of modern history and modern languages were founded at the
English universities, and when, with the fall of the Stuarts, the Court ceased to be the arbiter of men's fortunes."
"These discussions of the art of travel are relics of an age when Englishmen, next to the Germans, were known for the greatest travellers among all nations. In the same boat-load with merchants, spies, exiles, and diplomats from England sailed the young gentleman fresh from his university, to complete his education by a look at the most civilized countries of the world. He approached the Continent with an inquiring, open mind, eager to learn, quick to imitate the refinements and ideas of countries older than his own. For the same purpose that now takes American students to England, or Japanese students to America, the English striplings once journeyed to France, comparing governments and manners, watching everything, noting everything, and coming home to benefit their country by new ideas."
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