The Tour largely depended – at least implicitly – on a particular vision of Italy as backward and in decline, a valuable lesson of the ruins of a great Empire undermined from within by Catholic luxury and weakness: a view of the fall of Rome most eloquently taken by Edward Gibbon (1737–94). Even those from more modest backgrounds in Scotland, such as the novelist and surgeon Tobias Smollett (1721–71), began to view Continental Europe through this new British prism, one far removed from those of the Scoto-Irish Jacobite merchants of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bordeaux or Livorno.
