E.L.B.  London:  January 6, 1840.

Preface

to

The First Edition of Rienzi.

I began this tale two years ago at Rome.  On removing to Naples, I threw it aside for “The Last Days of Pompeii,” which required more than “Rienzi” the advantage of residence within reach of the scenes described.  The fate of the Roman Tribune continued, however, to haunt and impress me, and, some time after “Pompeii” was published, I renewed my earlier undertaking.  I regarded the completion of these volumes, indeed, as a kind of duty;—­for having had occasion to read the original authorities from which modern historians have drawn their accounts of the life of Rienzi, I was led to believe that a very remarkable man had been superficially judged, and a very important period crudely examined.  (See Appendix, Nos.  I and ii.) And this belief was sufficiently strong to induce me at first to meditate a more serious work upon the life and times of Rienzi. (I have adopted the termination of Rienzi instead of Rienzo, as being more familiar to the general reader.—­But the latter is perhaps the more accurate reading, since the name was a popular corruption from Lorenzo.) Various reasons concurred against this project—­and I renounced the biography to commence the fiction.  I have still, however, adhered, with a greater fidelity than is customary in Romance, to all the leading events of the public life of the Roman Tribune; and the Reader will perhaps find in these pages a more full and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi, than in any English work of which I am aware.  I have, it is true, taken a view of his character different in some respects from that of Gibbon or Sismondi.  But it is a view, in all its main features, which I believe (and think I could prove) myself to be warranted in taking, not less by the facts of History than the laws of Fiction.  In the meanwhile, as I have given the facts from which I have drawn my interpretation of the principal agent, the reader has sufficient data for his own judgment.  In the picture of the Roman Populace, as in that of the Roman Nobles of the fourteenth century, I follow literally the descriptions left to us;—­they are not flattering, but they are faithful, likenesses.

Preserving generally the real chronology of Rienzi’s life, the plot of this work extends over a space of some years, and embraces the variety of characters necessary to a true delineation of events.  The story, therefore, cannot have precisely that order of interest found in fictions strictly and genuinely dramatic, in which (to my judgment at least) the time ought to be as limited as possible, and the characters as few;—­no new character of importance to the catastrophe being admissible towards the end of the work.  If I may use the word Epic in its most modest and unassuming acceptation, this Fiction, in short, though indulging in dramatic situations, belongs, as a whole, rather to the Epic than the Dramatic school.