remuneration. "Not to my contemporaries," says Schopenhauer with fine
conviction in his preface to this edition, "not to my compatriots--to
mankind I commit my now completed work, in the confidence that it will
not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised,
as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the
passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my
mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work
through the course of a long life. And while the lapse of time has not
been able to make me doubt the worth of my work, neither has the lack of
sympathy; for I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the
absurd and senseless, stand in universal admiration and honour, and I
bethought myself that if it were not the case, those who are capable of
recognising the genuine and right are so rare that we may look for them
in vain for some twenty years, then those who are capable of producing
it could not be so few that their works afterwards form an exception to
the perishableness of earthly things; and thus would be lost the
reviving prospect of posterity which every one who sets before himself a
high aim requires to strengthen him."[3]

When Schopenhauer started for Italy Goethe had provided him with a
letter of introduction to Lord Byron, who was then staying at Venice,
but Schopenhauer never made use of the letter; he said that he hadn't
the courage to present himself. "Do you know," he says in a letter,
"three great pessimists were in Italy at the same time--Byron, Leopardi,
and myself! And yet not one of us has made the acquaintance of the
other." He remained in Italy until June 1819, when he proceeded to
Milan, where he received distressing news from his sister to the effect
that a Dantzic firm, in which she and her mother had invested all their
capital, and in which he himself had invested a little, had become
bankrupt. Schopenhauer immediately proposed to share his own income with