This letter brings into relief the writer’s characteristic attachment to home and dislike of separation from dear relatives, heightened by a vague anxiety not unnatural in the circumstances. A man who had fretted for five years in Italy could not look forward to an exile of at least six years in Turkey without some alarm. Turkey was not then the accessible, comparatively debarbarised country of our time: the Grand Signor’s dominions were two and a half centuries ago regarded as an obscure and distant region of disease and death. Sir John, in leaving England, felt like one stepping into the unknown: melancholy filled his heart, and pious prayer seemed the only refuge from despondency. Indeed, if he could have foreseen what lay before him, it is a question whether any earthly consideration could have induced him to quit his “native soyl.” One of the many dubious blessings granted by the gods to men is the inability to see into the future. Meanwhile Sir John knew that, short as it fell of his aspirations, the Constantinople post had not a few advantages. It was the only English mission abroad that, under a King who had little money to spare from his personal pleasures, rejoiced in the rank of Embassy; it carried with it a salary of 10,000 dollars, or about £2500, a year, not to mention perquisites of various kinds; and, be it noted, this salary, not coming out of the reluctant purse of a capricious and impecunious prince, but out of the Treasury of a wealthy business corporation--the Company of “Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas”--entailed no heart-breaking delays, no wearisome solicitations of friends at Court, but could be depended upon with as much certainty and regularity as any dividend from a sound investment: all the more, because Finch’s kinsmen, the Harveys, were leading members of that Company. Distinctly, a diplomat might go farther and fare worse. As to the duties of the post, Sir John was well equipped. Apart from ceremonial functions, his time at Florence had been taken up by questions arising out of the English trade in the Mediterranean; and both his correspondence from that place and a report on commerce with Egypt which he had drawn up lately[11] prove that he could do that sort of work easily enough. Now, that was the sort of work he would be called upon to do at Constantinople.