In Holland industry has brought prosperity, but Even liberty itself is barter'd here: At gold's superior charms all freedom flies, The needy sell it, and the rich man buys.

[3] Britain's free constitution has led to a lack of social cohesion, the rich defending their own liberties by oppressing the poor.

The poem concludes with the thought that happiness lies within: How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

[5][6] Goldsmith chose not to dedicate The Traveller to some powerful or wealthy patron, as was the normal practice of the time, but to his brother Henry, the ill-paid curate of an Irish parish.

[11] The style of The Traveller stands in the tradition of verse in heroic couplets that had dominated English poetry for the previous hundred years.

[16][17] Joseph Addison's Letters from Italy has a rather similar theme, insofar as it is a piece of travel-writing describing the Italian landscape and character in verse.

[18] Other names that have been mentioned include Richard Blackmore's The Nature of Man, James Thomson's Liberty, and Thomas Gray's fragment on "The Alliance of Education and Government".

[22] More recent research has shown that the philosophy of The Traveller owes much to Buffon's Histoire naturelle and Montesquieu's Esprit des lois.

The bibliographer Egerton Brydges preferred The Traveller: The sentiments are always interesting, generally just, and often new; the imagery is elegant, picturesque, and occasionally sublime; the language is nervous, highly finished, and full of harmony.

Campbell said The Traveller’s field of contemplation was rather desultory, while Hunt complained that some feeble lines gave it the air of having been interpolated.

Arthur Humphreys considered it "a true and thoughtful poem";[34] Boris Ford noted "the judicious tone, the unruffled movement, the urbane and fluent control of the couplet", which "established him as a great Augustan poet";[10] and Angus Ross thought that The Traveller proved him a poet with an individual voice, citing particularly its "genuine and deep note of feeling".