Reading Goethe's "Italian Journey". He hung out with a Frenchman, "a man of rank, who is well bred, but whose mind cannot go beyond himself and his immediate circle ... he is traveling through Italy for pleasure, but rapidly, in order to be able to say that he has seen it ... it caused me some surprise to think that anyone could ever travel in this temper, without a thought for anything beyond himself, and yet he is, in his way, a polished, sensible and well-connected person."

In Rome he is "oppressed and borne down with numberless phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once struck with some landscape, forms of every kind and style ... by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's seeing and admiring."