Daily Dose

From The Venetian Republic: Its Rise, its Growth, and its Fall, 421 - 1797, by W. Carew Hazlitt

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