But his adventures in this war belong to the
second part of the book. In the first part, he tells of his birth and
parentage, the foreign travel which was the fashionable completion
of the education of a gentleman in the seventeenth century, and his
adventures as a volunteer officer in the Swedish army, where he gained
the experience which was to serve him well in the Civil War at home.
Many a real Cavalier must have had just such a career as Defoe's hero
describes as his own. After a short time at Oxford, "long enough for
a gentleman," he embarked on a period of travel, going to Italy by
way of France. The Cavalier, however, devotes but little space to
description, vivid enough as far as it goes, of his adventures in
these two countries for a space of over two years. Italy, especially,
attracted the attention of gentlemen and scholars in those days,
but the Cavalier was more bent on soldiering than sightseeing and he
hurries on to tell of his adventures in Germany, where he first really
took part in warfare, becoming a volunteer officer in the army of
Gustavus Adolphus, the hero King of Sweden, and where he met with
those adventures the story of which forms the bulk of the first part
of the _Memoirs_.
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