Hese two volumes are the beginning of a work which, if I did not think of before I thought of the History of the Norman Conquest, I certainly thought of before the plan of that work had taken any definite shape. I believe my thoughts were first drawn towards Sicily, nearly fifty years back, by a Pindar lecture of the late Isaac Williams. That gave me, and I suppose others, some dim notion of one side of the story of the great Mediter ranean island. The other side was suggested to me some years later by Gally Knight's Normans in Sicily. The two sides were put into their fitting relation to one another by a few memorable words of Grote (chap. Xliii. Vol. V. P. 277)