Thus there were advantages in living in the country which contained the greatest sum of beauty.

Certain impressions you could get only there.

Others, favourable to life, you never got, and you got some that were very bad.

But from time to time you got one of a quality that made up for everything.
Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.

It made one idle and dilettantish and second-rate; it had no discipline for the character, didn't cultivate in you, otherwise expressed, the successful social and other "cheek" that flourished in Paris and London.