THE 18TH century was the golden age of the Grand Tour, when extended journeys on the European continent were made by royals, aristocrats and large numbers of middle-class travellers.

It was an era that produced a significant amount of travel literature and no traveller was more acid in his comments than the Scottish physician turned man of letters Tobias Smollett. Published in 1766, his Travels Through France and Italy remains immensely readable and fascinating.

The book chronicles the author’s two years on the continent, which began in June 1763. Like many travellers, Smollett was driven abroad by ill health — he suffered from TB — and also grief at the loss of his only daughter.

Relentlessly petulant and mistrustful and resentful of foreigners, Smollett reserves plenty of invective for the English tourist, too. His grievances begin on the road to the Channel: “I need not tell you this is the worst road in England, with respect to the conveniences of travelling,” he complains.

“The chambers are in general cold and comfortless, the beds paltry, the cookery execrable, the wine poison, the attendance [service] bad, the publicans insolent and the bills extortion; there is not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover.”

Smollett’s protracted outburst in a town in Provence, where he believes himself cheated over dinner and then is refused a departing coach by postilions in cahoots with the scheming landlord, outdoes any Trip Advisor review dishing the dirt.

Smollett eventually ferrets out the consul but the venal official provides no help to the traveller who, with the entire town watching, is finally forced to acquiesce to what he sees as robbery. Mortified and exhausted, Smollett slumps into the coach and makes his ignominious exit.

Such encounters only abet Smollett’s general disgust with the French: “If a Frenchman is capable of real friendship, it must certainly be the most disagreeable present he can possibly make to a man of true English character,” he writes.

It’s no surprise, then, that the dyspeptic Smollett hates French food and the “garlick” that contaminates all the horrid dishes inflicted upon him. French foppery is even worse: “The French have a most ridiculous fondness for their hair. A Frenchman will sooner part with his religion than with his hair.”

Appearance and appetite reveal still darker motivations: “If a Frenchman is admitted into your family and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece.

“If he suffers a repulse from you wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, of your niece, he will make addresses to your grandmother.”

Yet there are moments in Smollett’s Travels that are full of wonder at the beauty of the places visited, while prescient passages decry the squalor of life among the lower classes under tottering anciens regimes.

He writes forceful critiques of backward European customs like duelling and cultural practices tenaciously held onto in the century of the supposed Enlightenment.

Hugely popular and influential in its day, the book provides the rhetorical compass by which so many disagreeable travellers have since navigated and complained their way through their homelands and foreign territories.

Soon after the appearance of the Travels, Smollett was sent up as the “learned Smelfungus” by his acquaintance Laurence Sterne in his 1768 novel A Sentimental Journey. Smollett/Smelfungus is a bumbling boor whose description of the Pantheon in Rome is infinitely absurd: “’Tis nothing but a huge cockpit,” bellows the belligerent Brit.

Sterne’s novel makes fun both of the effusions of gung-ho travellers and the grumblings of Smollett and his ilk. When the characters in A Sentimental Journal exude enthusiasm they are treated to Sterne’s parodying wit: “I declare, ” exclaims the narrator Yorick,“...that was I in a desert, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections.”

Yorick is the greatest cheerleader of tourism there ever was or will be. He always finds something to look at, to be cheered and edified by. Complainers lack the spirit of discovery: “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry: “‘Tis all barren — and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.”

Sterne’s Yorick is a man of feeling and so must make a trip to the Opera Comique in Paris, where the action among the audience in the theatre is more entertaining than that on the stage and in Burgundy he enjoys the rural music accompanying the grape harvest.

Later, he makes a comparison between the spread of knowledge and song in the Italian street, “whereof those may partake, who pay nothing.”

Such sentiments motivated the great musical traveller Charles Burney, who produced the first musical travelogue. He set out on a six-month tour of France and Italy in 1770 and published his account of the journey the following year. A second trip to northern Europe followed in 1772 and brought forth two more detailed volumes.

While Burney's books are imbued with far more of Sterne’s sentimentality than Smollett’s sourness, he does shares with Smollett a penchant for hammering the French, though he does lighten his blows now and again.

Like most Englishman, especially those addicted to Italian opera, Burney rails against the stultifying conservatism of French musical culture and, for him, that nation’s subservience to dead musical heroes mirrored its acceptance of political absolutism.

Burney would level the same critique at Prussia when he arrived there two years later, while in Berlin he was denied an audience with the musician-king, Frederick the Great. Personal affronts invariably coloured this greatest of musical travellers’ observations.

In Italy, Burney seems almost to welcome the political chaos — though he is glad not to have to live under it all the time — because the patchwork of courts and ecclesiastical institutions yields a sumptuous surplus of music, some of it great, some of it shambolic, but all of it exciting.

Burney is not only interested in the opera and in services in glorious churches but also in the music of the street, from the exotic songs and instruments of Naples to the menacing military marches of parading German soldiers.

Because there is always something new to hear and something interesting to be found even in the most flawed performances, Burney’s three travel books are filled with memorable portraits and rigorous opinion.

When Burney hears music, the troubles of his journey disappear—from the battering coach ride over the Italian Apennines to a bivouac in German fields, to the harrowing raft trip down the Danube to Vienna.

The succession of departures and arrivals, the flow of inconvenience and anticipation, the boredom and dread of travel are forgotten as soon as the opera house curtain rises or the buskers start up.

When the travel craze cranks up again in the months ahead, there will be millions of Smolletts and Sternes on tour. It’s worth remembering that Burney had no Spotify and iPhone during bumpy coach rides, nor live streams from the Teatro di San Carlo.

Earbudded tourists will once again be on the move throughout the world and their pace will be far quicker than Burney’s. Many will be accompanied by their own private audiotopias but Burney’s mode of travel did not depend on having a perpetual soundtrack in tow.

Instead, he sought out music in its own place and time and in his gracious prose it comes alive again.

This article first appeared in Counterpunch, counterpunch.org. David Yearsley 's latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at [email protected]