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.
(See Appendix, Nos. I and II.) And this belief was sufficiently strong
to induce me at first to meditate a more serious work upon the life and
times of Rienzi. (I have adopted the termination of Rienzi instead of
Rienzo, as being more familiar to the general reader.--But the latter
is perhaps the more accurate reading, since the name was a popular
corruption from Lorenzo.) 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 perhaps 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 meanwhile, 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 chronology of Rienzi's life, the plot of