Excerpt from Scenes and Memories My Dear Children, The impressions gathered together in this book, though written most of them in this last decade, are all of them taken from very voluminous recollections jotted down at a much earlier period. If one day any of you think it worth while to publish these wider recollections, they will give a true picture of the world as it has appeared to me; for it has, throughout, been my aim to give an exact representation of my impressions of events, things, and people. That will be their only merit. I must explain, however, that the last chapter of this book, 'The Mysterious City, ' which has never been published, is a fantasy written to please a friend long since passed away, by collating records about some very interesting but unknown villas around Florence of which he had taken the photographs. The events I allude to are all true, and most of them I witnessed myself during my frequent and long sojourns in the Mysterious City; it will, however, be readily understood that names could not be given, though many of them will easily be guessed by those who knew the Florence of that day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.