WHEN
"When the present writer was about three and twenty, as a consequence of having accidentally met with Mr. Smedley's Sketches from Venetian History, the adventurous design formed itself in his mind of contributing to English literature a work on the same subject more detailed and more comprehensive. His experience was simply a negative quantity, or the oft-cited x; he knew very little about Venice, he was not conversant with the literature of the Republic and with the available material; he did not understand Italian; and he had never seen the place of which he proposed himself as historian."
First paragraph of the author's Preface
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