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Grand tour   /grænd tʊr/   Listen
Grand tour

noun
1.
An extended cultural tour of Europe taken by wealthy young Englishmen (especially in the 18th century) as part of their education.
2.
A sightseeing tour of a building or institution.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Grand tour" Quotes from Famous Books



... I am not certain that I have it correctly, having only heard it discussed between my father and mother when I was a growing girl, sitting at my sampler. I think he was a barrister; I know he was a very fine gentleman and a man of parts, who had made the Grand Tour; for when he was staying at the Great House, he said my mother was the only person he met who could converse with him on the Old Masters, or any other subject of virtu, and that, being reported to my Lady, increased her bitterness all the more because Mr. Belamour was a friend of Mr. Addison ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... did well to advance as far in a day as we now do in an hour. To make a country tour, required then the same precautions, as to supplies, as it now does to make the grand tour of Europe. To have carried coin would have been a great encumbrance, as well as risk from robbers. How accurately Bunyan knew the mode used in such cases to secure supplies, and with what beautiful simplicity it ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... this grand tour is completed, the travelled youth returns: And, what is his boast? Why to be able to tell, perhaps his better taught friend, who has never been out of his native country, that he has seen in ruins, what the other has a juster ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson

... just emerging from his minority, or freshly alighted from the grand tour, is easily captured. There are two principal contrivances for catching human pigeons. The first is the matrimonial snare. This is worked by the dowager, in concert with her daughter, somewhat on the following plan. The daughter throws herself, as if by chance, in the pigeon's ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... a Hand-book for Spain. From what we have written above it will have been seen that we are not altogether unacquainted with the country; indeed we plead guilty to having performed the grand tour of Spain more than once; but why do we say guilty—it is scarcely a thing to be ashamed of; the country is a magnificent one, and the people are a highly curious people, and we are by no means sorry that we have made the acquaintance of either. Detestation of the ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... Mountnorris (cr. 1628), and of Dorothy, daughter of Sir John Philipps of Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, was born at Dublin on the 10th of July 1614, was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1634. Having made the grand tour he returned to Ireland; and being employed by the parliament in a mission to the duke of Ormonde, now reduced to the last extremities, he succeeded in concluding a treaty with him on the 19th of June 1647, thus securing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... gilt top, $1.50. Being chapters of travel through Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Switzerland, covering places not usually visited by Americans in making "the Grand Tour of the Continent," by the accomplished writer ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... of them. I spent all one Saturday afternoon pasting them in an album as big as this table. They made a perfect fireside grand tour for me. What did you like best ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... described by recent travellers. Had I, therefore, attempted the difficult task of substituting manners of my own invention, instead of the genuine costume of the East, almost every traveller I met who had extended his route beyond what was anciently called "The Grand Tour," had acquired a right, by ocular inspection, to chastise me for my presumption. Every member of the Travellers' Club who could pretend to have thrown his shoe over Edom was, by having done so, constituted my lawful ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... words instead of things; upon the unlucky "virtuosos" who care for old medals, plants, and butterflies—pursuits which afforded an unceasing supply of ridicule to the essayists of the time; a denunciation of the corruption of modern youth, who learn nothing but new forms of vice in the grand tour; and a fresh assault upon Toland, Tindal, and other freethinkers of the day. There were some passages marked by Pope's usual dexterity, but the whole is awkwardly constructed, and has no very intelligible connexion with the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... as of right. A man of rank who takes orders should be rewarded for his condescension. If that qualification be not secured, you should aim at being tutor in a great family, accompany a lad on the grand tour, or write some pamphlet on a great man's behalf. Paley gained credit for independence at Cambridge, and spoke with contempt of the practice of 'rooting,' the cant phrase for patronage hunting. The text which he facetiously ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... hay was all carried, and Griffith came home in good spirits to tell his wife he was ready to make the grand tour ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... can be wittier than the now trite Tale of the Ephesian Matron, whose dry humour is worthy of The Nights? No wonder that it has made the grand tour of the world. It is found in the neo-Phaedrus, the tales of Musaeus and in the Septem Sapientes as the "Widow which was comforted." As the "Fabliau de la Femme qui se fist putain sur la fosse de son Mari," it tempted Brantome and La Fontaine; and Abel Remusat shows ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... many years ago that the Easy Chair, making the grand tour, was in Dresden, and saw in the newspaper that Jenny Lind, then in the first fulness of her fame, would sing for four nights in Berlin. It was in the autumn, and loitering along the Elbe and through the Saxon Switzerland was a very fascinating prospect. But the chance of hearing the Swedish ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... original:" A phrase, we fancy, rather oftener used by the young, or the unlearned, or the untraveled, than by the old, or the well-read, or the man who has made the grand tour. Certainly, the sense of originality exists at its highest in an infant, and probably at its lowest in him who has completed ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter among dusky ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... more "gladdened life" than this poet. He now [1833] resides in Paris, and may thence make the grand tour without an interpreter—speaking, as he does, French, Italian, and ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... the Prime Minister to take the knaves in hand. If I with staff and scallop-shell should try my way to win, Would Bonifaces quarrel as to who should take me in? Or would my pilgrim's progress end where Bunyan started his on, And my grand tour be round and round the backyard of a prison? I give you here a saying deep and therefore, haply true; 'Tis out of Merlin's prophecies, but quite as good as new: The question boath for men and meates longe voyages yt beginne Lyes in a notshell, rather saye lyes in a case of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... rich not only in vegetation, but containing unexplored treasures of precious metal and the vast mineral wealth peculiar to volcanic regions, where valuable chemical products are precipitated by the subterranean forces of Nature's mysterious laboratory. In the far-off days when "the grand tour" of Europe was the climax of the ordinary traveller's ambition, beautiful Java was relinquished on the plea of being an unknown and useless possession, too far from the beaten track of British sailing ships to be of practical value. The remonstrances of Sir Stamford Raffles, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... "Nature! that's it; nothing like it! When I was a lad, young men were sent abroad, after their school or college course; the grand tour, Paris, Vienna, that sort of thing: very good thing in its way, too, monstrous good thing. But before he sees the world, sir, a lad should know how to live, as you say, the natural life. Ought to know what a ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards

... and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also, between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if he takes good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon. Believe me, Claude, you will not stir from the place for a month at least. For be sure, if you are sea- sick, or heart-sick, or pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter or cheaper place of cure (to ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... General were tending our children. Indeed I don't know that I have yet forgiven myself for the pains and terrors that I must have caused my poor wife, by keeping her separate from her young ones, and away from her home, because, forsooth, I wished to see a little more of the war then going on. Our grand tour in Europe had been all very well. We had beheld St. Peter's at Rome, and the Bishop thereof; the Dauphiness of France (alas, to think that glorious head should ever have been brought so low!) at Paris; and the rightful King of England at Florence. I had dipped my gout ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... made the acquaintance in 1758 of Sir James Steuart,[20] and his wife, Lady Frances, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Wemyss and sister of the Jacobite Lord Elcho. Steuart, when making the grand tour, had met the exiled Stuarts at Rome, and had become attached to their cause. When the Young Pretender landed in Scotland in 1745, Steuart threw in his lot with him. On his master's business he went to Paris, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... having on his arm a woman far too young and too pretty for his deserts. And, besides this, there was a certain amount of vague, shifting foreign society, nobles on the loose, and young men on their grand tour, who mostly considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or at least a seemingly accidental meeting and introduction in the lobby of a theatre or the garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of their sight-seeing. Such people as ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... her graduation from the Charlestown Female Seminary, near Boston, made the grand tour with her father. This was not her first voyage, as he had entrusted her to Captain Creesy, master of the Flying Cloud on a long journey from China. But on the occasion of this grand tour graduation gift, he directed the Westward Ho up the Potomac and anchored in ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... and now that her desires were gratified she enjoyed herself with all the delight of a child and all the intelligence of a gifted woman. Travel was a rare pleasure for women then. A young English gentleman made the grand tour, and brought back, if he were foolish, nothing better than a few receipts for strange dishes, and some newer notions of vice than he had set out with; if he were wise he became "possessed of the tongues," ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... or other conveyances, leave the Hotel (weather permitting) at about 9.30 a.m., for a visit to the celebrated Gap of Dunloe and the grand tour of the Lakes. The route lies along the northern side of the Lower Lake for about six miles, when the exquisite mountain scenery comes in full view, rapidly assuming more interesting features until "Arbutus" ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... having opened the continent to the curiosity of the British traveller, Jackson curtly announced to his friends, that 'he was going to take a walk.' His poverty allowed him no other mode of locomotion; so off he set on the grand tour, carrying with him a map of France, a bundle of clothes, and a scanty supply of money. Crossing the channel, he reached Calais, a place which Horace Walpole, writing from Rome, declared had astonished him ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various

... vision of something lost, a type of what I had known when great ladies came to our country hall. M. Picot himself took her on the grand tour of the Continent. How much we had been hoping to see more of her I did not realize till she came back and ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... the kind of timber, therefore, out of which one would have supposed a great apostle of non-resistance could be made. He was brought up to the use of ample wealth, and his training and education were aristocratic. After leaving Oxford, he made the grand tour, and came home a finished young man of the world, with the pleasures and rewards of life before him. He had good brains and solid qualities, and the old admiral had high hopes of him. No doubt he would have made a very good figure in ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... her husband but a woman-of-the-world. Manners as fine as Mrs. McLane's, but too aloof and sensitive to care for leadership. She had made the grand tour in Europe, they discovered, and enjoyed a season in Washington. She should continue to live at the Occidental Hotel as her husband would be out so much at night and she was rather timid. And she was bright, unaffected, responsive. ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... and been susceptible of a test. It is easy travelling through the stages of such an hypothesis; you deposit at your bank a round sum ere you start, and, drawing on it piecemeal at every pause, complete your grand tour without a debt.' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... St. John was an accomplished person for that time of day. He had made the grand tour; he had bought pictures and statues; he spoke and wrote well in the modern languages; and being rich, hospitable, social, and not averse from the reputation of a patron, he had opened his house freely to the host ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... my beloved? Deakin, my beauty, where are you? Come to the arms of George, and let him introduce you. Capting Starlight Rivers! Capting, the Deakin: Deakin, the Capting. An English nobleman on the grand tour, to open his ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson

... spent on the Continent, making the Grand Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... baron. "Perhaps, however, you were only traveling to see the country! A grand tour, enlivened with studies of human nature, as well ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... your grand tour towards happiness," he exclaimed. "Dessert, caf noir—then the ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... had was the quiet walk with John from the old home to the new. When she came down, looking like a pretty Quakeress in her dove-colored suit and straw bonnet tied with white, they all gathered about her to say 'good-by', as tenderly as if she had been going to make the grand tour. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... Hervey has a young gentleman intrusted to his care, whom he has thoughts of sending abroad a year or two hence, to make the Grand Tour, as it is called; and finding Mr. Lovelace could give a good account of every thing necessary for a young traveller to observe upon such an occasion, he desired him to write down a description of the courts and countries he had visited, and what ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... untenanted West that I dropped down beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley, to hear about the green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in London years before, and that was the first I had known of his having been abroad. It was after one of his "big strikes" that he had made the Grand Tour, and had brought nothing away from it but the green canvas bags, which he conceived would fit his needs, and an ambition. This last was nothing less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently bourgeois of London. ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... his way with a friend of his father's to the Thing-Parliament, is in self-defence. Still, having no witnesses, he is, though powerfully backed (an all-important matter), fined and outlawed for three years. There is little love lost between him and his father, and he is badly fitted out for the grand tour, which usually occupies a young Icelandic gentleman's first outlawry; but his mother gives him a famous sword. On the voyage he does nothing but flirt with the mate's wife: and only after strong provocation and in the worst weather consents to bale, which ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury



Words linked to "Grand tour" :   circuit, tour



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