"Corner," or to Holland House, and flash on us at least a glimpse
of the brilliant men and women who formed the setting to his
sparkle; "dic in amicitiam coeant et foedera jungant."

This I have endeavoured to do, with such aid as I could command
from his few remaining contemporaries. His letters to his family
were destroyed by his own desire; on those written to Madame
Novikoff no such embargo was laid, nor does she believe that it was
intended. I have used these sparingly, and all extracts from them
have been subjected to her censorship. If the result is not Attic
in salt, it is at any rate Roman in brevity. I send it forth with
John Bunyan's homely aspiration:


And may its buyer have no cause to say,
His money is but lost or thrown away.



CHAPTER I--EARLY YEARS



The fourth decade of the deceased century dawned on a procession of
Oriental pilgrims, variously qualified or disqualified to hold the
gorgeous East in fee, who, with bakshish in their purses, a theory
in their brains, an unfilled diary-book in their portmanteaus,
sought out the Holy Land, the Sinai peninsula, the valley of the
Nile, sometimes even Armenia and the Monte Santo, and returned home
to emit their illustrated and mapped octavos. We have the type