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
a vast, unexplored, picturesc[ue wild, three thousand miles from civili¬
zation, becomes within three centuries the seat of the aiTogant 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 con¬
nection 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 aU 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."