Ward, Lock. Hard Cover. Book- Good Used, gilt titles on front board & spine, 400pp. Tissue-guarded frontis. Includes prefaces of earlier 1834 & 1850 editions. Bound in burgundy cloth with gold titles and blind emboss decoration. 400 pages with b/w frontis and others. Cover and Spine in very good condition. Edges dusty. Red Marbled endpapers. Some light foxing on initial ten pages and last ten pages, A tight straight intact book. Lightly soiled boards with light surface wear. Moderate edge rubbing with light corner bumping. Edward Bulwer Lytton, Lord Lytton (1803-1873) was another of those extraordinary prolific nineteenth century writers. His fiction covered several genres, "silver-fork", "Newgate", historical, mystical and Utopian. Perhaps his best-known work was The last days of Pompeii (1834). The Last Days of Pompeii was inspired by the painting on the same subject by Russian painter Karl Briullov (Carlo Brullo) which Bulwer-Lytton saw in Milan. Extract: I. - The Athenian's Love Story Within the narrow compass of the walls of Pompeii was contained a specimen of every gift which luxury offered to power. In its minute but glittering shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre, its circus - in the energy yet corruption, in the refinement yet the vice, of its people, you beheld a model of the whole Roman Empire. It was a toy, a plaything, a show-box, in which the gods seemed pleased to keep the representation of the great monarchy of earth, and which they afterwards hid from time, to give to the wonder of posterity - the moral of the maxim, that under the sun there is nothing new. Crowded in the glassy bay were vessels of commerce and gilded galleys for the pleasures of the rich citizens. The boats of the fishermen glided to and fro, and afar off you saw the tall masts of the fleet under the command of Pliny. Drawing a comrade from the crowded streets, Glaucus the Greek, newly returned to Pompeii after a journey to Naples, bent his steps towards a solitary part of the beach; and the two, seated on a small crag which rose amidst the smooth pebbles, inhaled the voluptuous and cooling breeze which, dancing over the waters, kept music with its invisible feet. There was something in the scene which invited them to silence and reverie. Clodius, the aedile, who sought the wherewithal for his pleasures at the gaming table, shaded his eyes from the burning sky, and calculated the gains of the past week. He was one of the many who found it easy to enrich themselves at the expense of his companion. The Greek, leaning upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun, his nation's tutelary deity, with whose fluent light of poesy and joy and love his own veins were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every wind that bent its pinions toward the shores of Greece. Glaucus obeyed no more vicious dictates when he wandered into the dissipations of his time that the exhilarating voices of youth and health. His heart never was corrupted. Of far more penetration than Clodius and others of his gay companions deemed, he saw their design to prey upon his riches and his youth; but he despised wealth save as the means of enjoyment, and youth was the great sympathy that united him to them. To him the world was one vast prison to which the sovereign of Rome was the imperial gaoler, and the very virtues which, in the free days of Athens, would have made him ambitious, in the slavery of earth made him inactive and supine. "Tell me, Clodius," said the Athenian at last, "hast thou ever been in love?" "Yes, very often." "He who has loved often," answered Glaucus, "has loved never."
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