The late Frank Ellis was working on a full biography of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, at the time of his death in 2007. He had contributed a life of Wilmot to the Oxford Dictionary of  National Biography which appeared in 2004. In it he wrote that ‘on 21 November 1661 he set out on his travels with a governor, Dr Andrew Balfour, a physician herbalist presumably chosen by the king, and two servants, with all expenses paid by the crown. The next three years are a blank...'. An account of the tour among the materials for the biography, however, fills in the gap. This was possible because in 1668 Balfour wrote accounts of his travels for Patrick Murray of Livingstone, a botanist who was about to set off for France, where he died in 1671. After Balfour's death in 1694 his son M[ichael?] Balfour published Letters written to a Friend, by the Learned and Judicious Sir Andrew Balfour, M. D., containing excellent Directions and Advices for Travelling thro' France and Italy ... Published from the Author's Original M.S. (Edinburgh, 1700) [page numbers in the text refer to this volume]. Dr Ellis observes that ‘M. Balfour's occasion for publishing it is the familiar pretext of "defective or incorrect" copies of the manuscript circulating in Edinburgh (sig. **2v). In the 274 pages of the "True Copy" Rochester is not mentioned by name. But neither Balfour nor his son excised the first person plural pronouns in the tour of Italy. And by this lapse Rochester becomes a character in Balfour's narration.