In taking the field as a dramatist, Byron sought to win distinction for himself--in the first place by historical accuracy, and, secondly, by artistic regularity--by a stricter attention to the dramatic "unities." "History is closely followed," he tells Murray, in a letter dated July 17, 1820; and, again, in the Preface (_vide post_, pp. 332-337), which is an expansion of the letter, he gives a list of the authorities which he had consulted, and claims to have "transferred into our language an historical fact worthy of commemoration." More than once in his letters to Murray he reverts to this profession of accuracy, and encloses some additional note, in which he points out and rectifies an occasional deviation from the historical record. In this respect, at any rate, he could contend on more than equal terms "with established writers," that is, with Shakespeare and Otway, and could present to his countrymen an exacter and, so, more lifelike picture of the Venetian Republic. It is plain, too, that he was bitten with the love of study for its own sake, with a premature passion for erudition, and that he sought and found relief from physical and intellectual excitement in the intricacies of research. If his history is at fault, it was not from any lack of diligence on his part, but because the materials at his disposal or within his cognizance were inaccurate and misleading. He makes no mention of the huge collection of Venetian archives which had recently been deposited in the Convent of the Frari, or of Doria's transcript of Sanudo's Diaries, bequeathed in 1816 to the Library of St. Mark; but he quotes as his authorities the _Vitæ Ducum Venetorum_, of Marin Sanudo (1466-1535), the _Storia, etc._, of Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), and the _Principj di Storia, etc._, of Vettor Sandi, which belongs to the latter half of the eighteenth century. Byron's chroniclers were ancient, but not ancient enough; and, though they "handed down the story" (see Medwin, _Conversations_, p. 173), they depart in numerous particulars from the facts recorded in contemporary documents. Unquestionably the legend, as it appears in Sanudo's perplexing and uncritical narrative (see, for the translation of an original version of the Italian, _Appendix_, pp. 462-467), is more dramatic than the "low beginnings" of the myth, which may be traced to the annalists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but, like other legends, it is insusceptible of proof. Byron's Doge is almost, if not quite, as unhistorical as his Bonivard or his Mazeppa. (See _Nuovo Archivio Veneto_, 1893, vol. v. pt. i. pp. 95-197; 1897, vol. xiii. pt. i. pp. 5-107; pt. ii. pp. 277-374; _Les Archives de Venise_, par Armand Baschet, 1870; _Storia della Repubblica di Venizia_, Giuseppe Cappelletti, 1849, iv. pp. 262-317.)