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.