IN ITS

PICTURESQUE, SOCIAL, AND HISTORICAL

ASPECTS:

THE RECORD OF A TOUR IN THE SUMMER OF 1852,

BY FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

BY RUSSELL MARTINEAU, M. A.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

THE Translator has endeavoured to enhance the value of this book to the English public by the verification of the references to classical and Italian authors, and the citation of the originals where any interest seemed to attach to them; and also by the addition of indices. All the notes, moreover, are added by him. He has received from the accomplished author encouragement in his task, and has been favoured with the correction of numerous errata in the German edition.

The Corsican Voceri the Translator considered to be so characteristic and original, that he did not feel himself justified in cutting down their number or curtailing their length. Cultivated Europe being obliged to M. Gregorovius for drawing these songs forth from their island obscurity, his Translator would be unpardonable if he shrunk from the labour of introducing them to an English public. Yet this is the part of the work for which the greatest indulgence is craved. An attempt to procure the Corsican book whence M. Gregorovius extracted them having failed up to the date of publication, the Translator has been forced to produce his version from the German translation, and has therefore reason to fear that it may be both harsher and farther from the Italian original than if translated at first-hand. In the slight metrical irregularities he has allowed himself, he is fully countenanced by the German version.

Over the original poems he is not so presumptuous as to fancy that he has shed any of the grace and poetic ease which form the charm of the originals, and have gained for them a comparison with Heine and even with Goethe. Enough if they serve to break the even tenor of the prose, and to raise a livelier and more poetical conception of the scenes that inspired them.

Finally, the Translator sincerely regrets to appear in an attitude of rivalry to an elegant and not unfaithful translation. But his work was almost completed at the time of the earliest announcement of Mr. Muir's projected translation; and his arrangements with his Publishers had been made many months previously.

PENRITH, March, 1855.

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