William Hamilton, then the centre of the most polished society in
Naples, he met not only artists and archeologists, but men of letters
and of affairs. Among these, he was peculiarly drawn to the two
distinguished economists, the abate Galiani and the cavaliere
Filangieri, in whose company he enjoyed for the first time sound
learning unhampered by pedantry. The lively Galiani proved that social
tastes and a broad wit are not incompatible with more serious interests;
and Filangieri threw the charm of a graceful personality over any topic
he discussed. In the latter, indeed, courtly, young and romantic, a
thinker whose intellectual acuteness was steeped in moral emotion, Odo
beheld the type of the new chivalry, an ideal leader of the campaign
against social injustice. Filangieri represented the extremest optimism
of the day. His sense of existing abuses was only equalled by his faith
in their speedy amendment. Love was to cure all evils: the love of man
for man, the effusive all-embracing sympathy of the school of the
Vicaire Savoyard, was to purge the emotions by tenderness and pity. In
Gamba, the victim of the conditions he denounced, the sense of present
hardship prevailed over the faith in future improvement; while
Filangieri's social superiority mitigated his view of the evils and
magnified the efficacy of the proposed remedies. Odo's days passed
agreeably in such intercourse, or in the excitement of excursions to the
ruined cities; and as the court and the higher society of Naples offered
little to engage him, he gradually restricted himself to the small
circle of chosen spirits gathered at the villa Hamilton. To these he
fancied the abate de Crucis might prove an interesting addition; and the
desire to learn something of this problematic person induced him to quit
the villa at the moment when the abate took leave.

They found themselves together on the threshold; and Odo, recalling to
the other the circumstances of their first meeting, proposed that they