Some justly admired Authors having condescended to glean a few stray
thoughts from these Letters, which have remained dormant a great many
years; I have been at length emboldened to lay them before the public.
Perhaps, as they happen to contain passages which persons of
acknowledged taste have honoured with their notice, they may possibly be
less unworthy of emerging from the shade into daylight than I imagined.
Most of these Letters were written in the bloom and heyday of youthful
spirits and youthful confidence, at a period when the old order of
things existed with all its picturesque pomps and absurdities; when
Venice enjoyed her piombi and submarine dungeons; France her bastile;
the Peninsula her holy Inquisition. To look back upon what is beginning
to appear almost a fabulous era in the eyes of the modern children of
light, is not unamusing or uninstructive; for, still better to
appreciate the present, we should be led not unfrequently to recall the
intellectual muzziness of the past.
But happily these pages are not crowded with such records: they are
chiefly filled with delineations of landscape and those effects of
natural phenomena which it is not in the power of revolutions or
constitutions to alter or destroy.
A few moments snatched from the contemplation of political crimes,
bloodshed, and treachery, are a few moments gained to all lovers of
innocent illusion. Nor need the statesman or the scholar despise the
occasional relaxation of light reading. When Jupiter and the great
deities are represented by Homer as retiring from scenes of havoc and
carnage to visit the blameless and quiet Ethiopians, who were the
farthest removed of all nations, the Lord knows whither, at the very
extremities of the ocean,--would they have given ear to manifestos or
protocols? No, they would much rather have listened to the Tales of
Mother Goose.
London, June 12th, 1834.