Some persons enjoy traveling in solitude; the presence of a companion disturbs their susceptibility to receiving valuable “impressions.” Others enjoy it intensely but would be wretched unless they were accompanied by some one capable of supplying them with the impressions they long to have but don’t know how. Many regard travel entirely from an educational angle. They have a tendency to translate everything they see into terms of dates. It pleases them to learn, for instance, that Lucca Delia Robbia was born in 1400, and that “while Botticelli was one of the worst anatomists he was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance,” but they worry a good deal for fear they’ll forget it. In the meanwhile they rather lose sight of Delia Robbia’s “sweet, ethereal and visionary grace,” as well as Botticelli’s anatomy and draughtsmanship; but it’s a comfort to know that they know they’re there. Still others travel in a pleasantly aimless fashion, quietly reveling in their lack of obligation to see or to do anything they do not wish to. One man I know, who belongs to this type, has a genuine love of art and considerable knowledge of it; but although he has been in London several times he has never seen either the National Gallery or the Elgin marbles. When I asked him why not, he said in all sincerity that when he was in London he had never been in the kind of mood that made it a pleasure to look at such things, and he hated to make a duty of what often was so great a pleasure. The pleasure of travel, in a word, depends entirely upon the point of view. Like all the other pleasures of life it depends, to employ the trite, true phrase, upon what we ourselves bring to it. I may be wrong, but it often seems to me that English people of a certain kind are the best, the ideal, travelers. We all know, of course, that the continent of Europe is infested with the most odious English tourists, who cross the channel for a stay of a week or two and who spend most of their time in disputing hotel bills, in trying to get something for nothing and in despising the various countries they visit because they happen to differ in many respects from the British Isles. One hears much of “vulgar Americans,” and one often sees them; but in my tolerably wide experience none of God’s creatures masquerading as human beings has ever filled me with the same horror that I have in the presence of this type of coarse, brutal, dense, provincial touring English person--man or woman. In America we simply have never invented such an awful type; it is inconceivable to us until we meet it in the form of certain English people on the Continent.