I found at Dresden, in Count Woltstein, vanity-love, a melancholy temperament, monarchical habits, thirty years, and ... his individual peculiarities.
For anyone who is to form a judgment on love, this way of viewing things is conveniently short and cooling to the head—an essential, but difficult operation.
Now, as in physiology man has learnt scarcely anything about himself, except by means of comparative anatomy, so in the case of passions, through vanity and many other causes of illusion, we can only get enlightenment on what goes on in ourselves from the foibles we have observed in others. If by chance this essay has any useful effect, it will be by bringing the mind to make comparisons of this sort. To lead the way, I am going to attempt a sketch of some general traits in the character of love in different nations.
I beg for pardon if I often come back to Italy; in the present state of manners in Europe, it is the only country where the plant, which I describe, grows in all freedom. In France, vanity; in Germany, a pretentious and highly comical philosophy; in England, pride, timid, painful and rancorous, torture and stifle it, or force it into a crooked channel.[3]
[1] See Cabanis, influence of the physical, etc.
[2] The laces missing from Minister Roland's shoes: "Ah, Monsieur, all is lost," answers Dumouriez. At the royal sitting, the President of the Assembly crosses his legs.
[3] The reader will have perceived only too easily that this treatise is made up of Lisio's Visconti's fragmentary account of events, written in the order that they were presented to him on his travels. All these events may be found related at length in the journal of his life; perhaps I ought to have inserted them—but they might have been found scarcely suitable. The oldest notes bear the date, Berlin 1807, and the last are some days before his death, June 1819. Some dates have been altered expressly to avoid indiscretion; but the changes, which I have made, go no further than that. I have not thought myself authorised to recast the style. This book was written in a hundred different places—so may it be read!