PREFACE.

I PUBLISH these little volumes with much hesitation. They treat, for the most part, of times long past, and refer to a country now made accessible by a few hours' journey and familiar to us by every mode of illustration. It is more than a hundred years ago that Johnson, reviewing a work called Memoirs of the Court of Augustus,' said of it,-the "book relates to a people. "who above all others have furnished employment to "the studious and amusement to the idle; who have "scarcely left behind them a coin or a stone which has "not been examined and explained a thousand times; "and whose dress and food and household stuff it has "been the pride of learning to understand." This remark must apply, in part, to any work that treats either of Rome, or Italy under its Roman masters; and if it was true in 1756, with how much greater force must it apply to a book published after an interval during which archæological studies, and particularly those which relate to Rome, have made greater progress than at any former period!

I should not, indeed, have ventured upon such a publication but for the following circumstance.

When I rejoined Lord Byron at La Mira, on the banks of the Brenta, in the summer of 1817, I found him employed upon the fourth canto of 'Childe Harold,' and, later in the autumn, he showed me the first sketch of the Poem. It was much shorter than it afterwards became, and it did not remark on several objects which appeared to me peculiarly worthy of notice. I made a list of those objects, and, in conversation with him, gave him reasons for the selection. The result was the Work as it now appears, and he then engaged me to write notes for the whole canto. I performed this task chiefly at Venice, where I had the advantage of consulting the Ducal library, and was seduced by the attractions of the inquiry, and, if I may say so much, by my love for it, into a commentary too bulky for an appendix to the Verses. The consequence was the division of the notes into two parts, one of which was appended to the canto in the form of notes, the other appeared in a separate volume of Historical Illustrations.' I mentioned this in the Preface to that volume, and I repeat it now to another generation, to account for venturing to write about Italy at all.

I have been given to understand that both the Notes