How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excels a dunce that has been kept at home!

Cowper’s couplet is a satirical jab at the commonplace assumption that travel automatically improves a person. By calling both figures “dunces,” he suggests that mere movement—being “sent to roam”—does not confer wisdom or refinement; at best it produces only a superficial advantage over the equally ignorant person who stayed home. The humor depends on the paradox of “excels”: the traveler may return with a veneer of experience, fashionable opinions, or borrowed manners, yet remain fundamentally unchanged. The lines thus critique social pretension and the tendency to mistake novelty and cosmopolitan exposure for genuine education or moral/intellectual growth.