Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/56

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FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

for five years. Berkeley stopped for a while in Paris, where he seems to have made the acquaintance of Malebranche; then, crossing the Alps on the first of January, 1715, he entered Italy. He traversed the entire peninsula, making his longest stops at Florence, Rome, and Naples. His journal indicates that he was much interested in archæology and in modern painting, and that he played to perfection his part as traveling tutor, visiting palaces, churches, private collections, and the ruins of ancient monuments. He did also something which very few visitors have done before or since: he traveled through a great part of southern Italy, stopping in many places—often in monasteries—and interesting himself in agriculture, in the political organization of the country, and most of all in the famous question of the dance of the tarantula. In 1720 he started back toward London, but stopped at Lyons to write a Latin essay, De motu, to be presented in a competition held by the Parisian Academy of Science.

His return to England marks the beginning of a new period in his life: the period of his apostleship. He found his country convulsed by the catastrophe of the South Sea Bubble, and he published almost at once a little work in which he sought to remind his fellow citizens that nothing