LONDON: _PRINTED BY S. AND J. BENTLEY, WILSON, AND FLEY,_ Bangor House, Shoe Lane. DEDICATION. --- TO BAYLE ST. JOHN. I DEDICATE the following work to you, my dear Son, as a token of my gratitude for the cheerful patience with which you have aided me in completing it, despite the calamity that overtook me in the midst of my labours. Whatever may be the fate of the publication it will always recall to me some of the happiest hours of my life, rendered so chiefly by beholding the contented serenity with which you subdued the irksomeness of studies so little suited to your years. At length, however, you are delivered from lexicographers and scholiasts. The final page has been written, the last proof read. I escape from a task commenced before you were born, and you from a four years’ apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of authorship. All that now remains is to watch the reception which the fruit of our toil may meet with in the world. It has been produced and has grown up under very peculiar circumstances. Whithersoever we have travelled, the wrecks of Grecian literature have accompanied us, and the studies to which these pages owe their existence have been pursued under the influence of almost every climate in Europe. Nay, if I pushed my researches still further and visited the portion of Africa commonly supposed to have been the cradle of Hellenic civilisation, it was solely in the hope of qualifying myself to speak with some degree of confidence on the subject of those arts which represent to the Modern World so much of the grandeur and genius of Greece. Here, probably, the action of pestilential winds, and of the sands and burning glare of the desert commenced that dimming of the “visual ray,” which, in all likelihood, will wrap me gradually in complete darkness, and veil for ever from my sight those forms of the beautiful which have been incarnated, if I may so speak, in marble. This is a language which neither you nor your sister can read to me. All that sweet Olympian brood which used to smile upon me with kindly recognition when I was a solitary wayfarer in lands not my own, will, as far as I am concerned, be annihilated. Those twelve mystical transformations of Aphroditè into stone, which may be beheld all together at Naples, and appeared to me more lovely than its vaunted bay, or even the sky that hangs enamoured over it, will, I conjecture, be seen of me no more, or seen obscurely as through a mist. Homer, however, and Æschylus, with Plato and Thucydides and Demosthenes, will be able still through the voices of my children—voices more cheerful and willing than ministered to the old age and blindness of Milton—to project their beauty into my soul. I will not, therefore, repine; but, imitating the example of wiser and better men, submit unmurmuringly to