Mr. Julius Griffiths, who ranks among the best educated of Englishmen, has made himself widely known in the world of letters by works of acknowledged merit. He has travelled all over the globe, and deserves to be proclaimed the greatest traveller of his time. His social qualities and his lofty sentiments have conferred the greatest honour on the English character outside his native country. His friendship has been for many years the source of my sweetest happiness. I am enabled to confess with gratitude that he was instrumental in convincing me of the mendacity of the precept, ‘not to try one’s friends if one wishes to keep them.’ The thing I stood most in need of, after the first greetings of such a sincere friend, was rest and quietude; hence, at the moment I did not in the least resemble the ‘inquisitorial traveller’ mentioned by Sterne, and I retired to enjoy that rest, most intensely conscious of the delight of having reached port. In spite of this, sleep failed to come. Too many thoughts came crowding in upon me; my mind was divided between the pleasure of meeting once more with so dear a friend and others scarcely less precious to me, and the hope of being a witness of a scene which hitherto was without a precedent. Were I possessed of the talent with which Dupaty has described his ‘Première nuit à Rome,’ I should endeavour to paint the stirring emotions of this ‘first night’ in Vienna. A volume of Shakespeare lay close at hand; I opened it at random and read: ‘You who have not seen those feasts, you have lost the sight of what is most brilliant of earthly glory. Those perfectly magnificent scenes surpassed all that the imagination can invent. Each day outvied the previous one, each morrow shamed the pomp of its eve. One day those demi-gods on earth resplendent with precious stones and silken stuffs; the next the same pomp more oriental than the orient itself. You should have seen each world-ruler dazzling like a statue wrought of gold; and the courtiers resplendent like their masters; and those dames so delicate and so slight bend beneath the twofold burden of their pride and their ornaments; those sovereigns, stars of like magnitude, mingle their rays by their presence. No calumnious tongue dared wag, no eye that was not dazzled by those sights. You should have witnessed also the tournament and the heralds of arms, and the prowess of chivalry displayed. The old history of our story-tellers has ceased to be fabulous. Yes, henceforth I shall believe all that those story-tellers have told us.’[14] Those lines from an immortal poet, I read again and again; and swayed by those powerful impressions, I owed to them the conception of noting down my recollections, convinced that in times to come, _i.e._ at a period to which I looked forward courageously, I should be delighted to refer to them as the sole food for my thoughts. CHAPTER I