Page:The Last Days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton - Volume 1.djvu/21

 the classics have entered into the education of our youth, and the studies of our maturity. Yet even did a writer possess the utmost advantage of this nature which education and study can bestow, it might be scarcely possible so entirely to transport himself to an age so different from his own, but that he would incur some inaccuracies, some errors of inadvertence or forgetfulness. And when, in works upon the Manners of the Ancients, works even of the gravest character composed by the profoundest scholars, some such imperfections will often be discovered even by a critic, in comparison, but superficially informed, it would be far too presumptuous in me to hope that I have been more fortunate than men infinitely more learned, in a work in which learning is infinitely less required. It is for this reason, that I venture to believe, that scholars themselves will be the most lenient of my judges. Enough, if this book, whatever its imperfections, should be found a portrait—unskilful perhaps in colouring—faulty in drawing—but, not altogether an unfaithful likeness of the features and the costume of the age which I have attempted to paint:—may it be (what is far more important) a just representation of the