but I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to find innumerable and far more illustrious instances.  It is lucky that I am of a temper not to be easily turned aside, though by no means difficult to irritate.  But I am making a dissertation, instead of writing a letter.  I write to you from the Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba and Corsica visible from my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean rolling blue at my feet.  As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or endure those of others.

“I have the honour to be, truly,

“Your obliged and faithful servant,

“NOEL BYRON.

“To I. D’Israeli, Esq.”

The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this letter.

* * * * *

This work, conceived in youth, executed by the research of manhood, and associated with the noblest feelings of our nature, is an humble but fervent tribute, offered to the memory of those Master Spirits from whose labours, as BURKE eloquently describes, “their country receives permanent service:  those who know how to make the silence of their closets more beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates, and camps.”

LITERARY CHARACTER.

CHAPTER I.

Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art.

Diffused over enlightened Europe, an order of men has arisen, who, uninfluenced by the interests or the passions which give an impulse to the other classes of society, are connected by the secret links of congenial pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in the same common labours, and participating in the same divided glory.  In the metropolitan cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and the same opinions become established:  the Englishman is familiar with Machiavel and Montesquieu; the Italian and the Frenchman with Bacon and Locke; and the same smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of the Thames, of the Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare, Moliere, and Cervantes—­

  Contemporains de tous les hommes,
  Et citoyens de tous les lieux.

A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Moliere, and discovered the Tartuffe in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the translation which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of France might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the Turks and the Tartars.  We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar characteristics of the historian Guicciardini:  the German Schlegel writes on our Shakspeare like a patriot; and while the Italians admire the noble scenes which our Flaxman has drawn from their great poet, they have rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists.  Such is the wide and the perpetual influence of this living intercourse of literary minds.