Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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Needless to say, Sir Thomas did his best to solace Sir John for the loneliness which is the penalty of greatness. That he was a cheerful companion it would be absurd to imagine: he was just as cheerful as could be expected from one who often lay, as he himself tells us, “under the torment of gout and stone both in bladder and rheyns”ssss1—common distempers of the times. Not that Finch enjoyed wild spirits either. Both were of a studious and sedentary disposition, and their long residence in Italy had confirmed their constitutional languor: so much so that their friends in England had found the ways of these “Italians,” as they nicknamed them, a little hard to understand. As a consequence, they both indulged rather freely in exercises of a theologico-philosophical character and in the pleasures of the table. For the rest, their recreations appear to have been of a strictly conventual innocence. Let us intrude for an instant upon their domestic privacy.

It is the beginning of summer, 1674, and Sir Thomas is seated at his escritoire, writing to Lord Conway. After enumerating “my Lord Ambassadour’s” multitudinous achievements, he descends to matters of a less exalted and more pleasing nature. His very style loses much of its rhetorical affectation as he writes: