ffred's
nearly-forgotten treasures'...what a record of degrading circumstances, is the life of a great poet!'
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There is no bigotry so terrible as the bigotry of a country that flatters itself that it is philosophical.
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'When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.'
I first encountered a reference to this work by Benjamin Disraeli in The Impostor, by William North (which perhaps I may transcribe someday). Appropriate reading for one's second or third childhood, this work written in Disraeli's youth is both romantically inspiring and self-deprecatingly humorous. One may imagine Hermann Hesse enjoying it. Even though Disraeli supposedly considered it his best novel, it is not available at Project Gutenberg, so I decided to take it on.
Originally I started working with this scan of the 1853 edition. However, its condition is so poor that I started over with this scan of the 1871 edition [that volume also includes The Rise of Iskander, which I omitted because a Project Gutenberg version already exists]. Obvious typographical errors were corrected. Although names of historic places and people were mostly left as is, some inconsistent or obsolete spellings (e.g. "connexion," "canvass") were standardized.So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
May 25, 2026