"Well, supposing that you did not go, but that you had read books on
Italian Art, and made out a list of the pictures you wanted to see at each
great town--Florence, Venice, Rome, Siena--and knew about each painter,
his history, his style, and photographs of his works, and copied out under
each picture what good critics had said of it, or at least put a reference
to the book where it was mentioned (_e.g._ Kingsley's description of
Bellini's Doge; Browning on Fra Lippo Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin;
Ruskin's best descriptions); and if you looked out all the famous men of
each town, and knew their history, and what parts of the town were sacred
to them; if you studied the buildings of each town, looked up its
architecture, and tried to draw it from photographs and illustrations, and
then hunted out all the poetry and novels about each place, and drew out a
sketch of its history, marking where the local history of the town
dovetailed into larger European interests, and specially where it touched
England--I think, after this, you would enjoy meeting any one from Italy
almost as much as if you had been there, and you would not feel you had
read up for nothing. I should take a fresh country every year, and make
believe that you were going to it next summer, and that you were getting
ready to be 'Eyes,' and not 'No Eyes,' while there. You would have got the
spirit of the country by this, far more than ninety-nine out of a hundred
of those who go to it in the flesh. You are leaving school at eighteen,
and by the time you are five and twenty, _i.e._ before you are fully grown
up, you might have thus visited Italy, France, Germany, Spain, America,
India, which would make you a fairly cultivated person."

"But it is so hard to get books; I can read Ruskin while I am with you,
and when I am with Uncle Charles I could find some of the others I should
want, but I can't get hold of a course of reading at home."

"But if you have such a large peg as Italy on which to hang your reading,