The statesmen of Europe still continued their efforts to avert a conflict, but to no purpose.
In his foreign policy Pericles differs from those statesmen of previous generations who sought above all the welfare of Greece as a whole.
He was in communication all his life with the leading contemporary statesmen, so that his correspondence is one of the most interesting and important of historical documents.
But, still clinging to the groundless belief, for which British statesmen had, of late at least, afforded Turkey no justification, that Great Britain at all events would support him, he obstinately refused to give ear to the pressing requests of the Powers that the necessary reforms should be instituted.
He published Lives of Foreign Statesmen (1830), The Greek and the Turk (1853), and Reigns of Louis X VIII.