But alas! the best of these sources of happiness--the happiness that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse--was sealed to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern satraps--attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes, attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common run of his countrymen--that he stood in the scale of creation as far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects. This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was; and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant. Fortunate in this respect also, Sir John Finch had under his own roof all the society he needed. It consisted of one person--Sir Thomas Baines, another Doctor of Medicine, some years his senior. Finch had made Baines’s acquaintance at Christ’s College, and from that moment the two had become inseparable. Together at Cambridge, they went together to Padua, where they read the same books and took the same degrees. When Finch returned to England in 1661, he saw to it that Baines shared his good fortune. Both were elected Fellows of the College of Physicians of London on the same day, and together they were made Doctors of Medicine at Cambridge. Finch’s devotion knew no bounds. When he was appointed Minister at Florence, he got his friend appointed physician to the Legation, interested all his relatives in him, and, through the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Conway, procured him the honour of Knighthood in 1672. After living with Finch in Italy and England, Baines followed him to Turkey in the character of a comrade and confidant.