PREFACE.
This work, of which the first volume is now complete in sixteen parts, is the outgrowth of more than a dozen years of careful study and persistent research. The subject is one of unusual interest, and notwithstanding the immense labor involved, it has attracted and diverted rather than wearied the author, and kept the soul stirred with constantly increasing enthusiasm. The outlook will speak for itself to every intelligent reader. A wooded island upon the border of vast, unexplored, picturesque wild, three thousand miles from civilization, becomes within three centuries the seat of the arrogant metropolis of the Western world. The narrative embraces the condition of Europe which contributed to this remarkable result, the origin and birth of the city in which we take so much pride, its early vicissitudes, the various steps of progress through which it became powerful, the connection of causes and effects, the rise of churches, schools, colleges, charities, and other institutions, the machinery, commercial and political, with all its crudities, breakages, friction, and modern improvements, ever producing unlooked-for events, its wars and rumors of wars, its public characters and foreign relations, and its social thread, knotting and tangling, but yet running through all the years, spinning its own way and coiling itself into every feature of the structure,—the cable, indeed, to hold the multiplicity of parts together. In the language of a prominent leader of public opinion, "hardly did old Rome herself emerge from a more mysterious and fascinating crucible of legend and tradition."
