It was in the Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy," published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own.

It was not everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that he was careless of comfort and health.

Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos, Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was ?), were as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu.

He read insatiably before starting all the recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw; and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations.

And he had his reward.
It is not any ordinary journalist and sketcher who could have compelled from Tennyson such a tribute as lines "To E.L.on his Travels in Greece":-- "Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls Of water, sheets of summer glass, The long divine Peneian pass, The vast Akrokeraunian walls, "Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair, With such a pencil, such a pen, You shadow forth to distant men, I read and felt that I was there." Lear was a man to whom, as to Tennyson's Ulysses, "All experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world." After settling at San Remo, and when he was nearly sixty years old, he determined to visit India and Ceylon.