Chapter XXXVII

Do not think yourself an accomplished traveller merely because you have visited places where you _might_ have acquired much information. Many a man has passed some time in a foreign town without learning more about the beauties of its cathedral or the manners and customs of its inhabitants than was previously known to others through the instructive medium of a book and pair of spectacles at home; and therefore although you may have really been at Rome, and may have actually seen with your own eyes both the Apollo Belvidere and Raphael's Transfiguration, you must not, on that account only, consider yourself qualified to take a leading part in every conversation on subjects connected with the fine arts.