Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes
Edward Bulwer Lytton
(Forgotten Books, June 27, 2012)
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. And this belief was sufficiently strong to induce me at first to meditate a more serious work upon the life and times of Rienzi. f 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 peihaps 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 mean while, 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 c(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)