20457.8(1) V B HARVARD LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. PREFACE. OF the HISTORICAL ESSAYS contained in these volumes, the first and the second have not before been printed; and the third, published two years ago in the Edinburgh Review, appears with some important additions rendering it so far a new illustration of the period to which it relates, that I have ventured to think I might here reproduce it with Essays having more exclusively the pretension and purpose of making original contribution to history. Of the BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS, two have been published in the Edinburgh Review, and two in the Quarterly Review; but all, as they are now printed, have received large additions and careful revision. Not for this should I have presumed, however, to give them a form less dependant and more accessible than that of the distinguished periodicals in which they appeared originally. A more numerous issue of volumes from the press is not among the wants of the time. But from the first |