ON MODERN HISTORY, FROM THE IRRUPTION OF THE NORTHERN NATIONS ΤΟ THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. BY WILLIAM SMYTH, PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. SECOND AMERICAN, FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION, WITH A PREFACE, LIST OF BOOKS ON AMERICAN HISTORY, BY JARED SPARKS, LL. D., PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. CAMBRIDGE : PUBLISHED BY JOHN OWEN. CHARLES C. LITTLE & JAMES BROWN, AND JAMES MUNROE & CO., BOSTON; 1843. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, by JOHN OWEN, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Add to sub CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. NOTHING SO much embarrasses a student, who is beginning the study of history, as the difficulty he finds in selecting the best authors, ascertaining their intrinsic and relative merits, and in marking out for himself the most profitable course of reading. He is bewildered amidst a multitude of books, and perpetually at a loss, as he proceeds, to determine the comparative importance of periods, events, and characters. If he seeks a guide, he is either met by a dry catalogue of authors, arranged with little discrimination, or referred to abridgments and abstracts, as destitute of the soul and substance of history, properly so called, as a skeleton is of the spirit and proportions of a living man. His time is thus lost and his patience exhausted, while he makes scarcely any progress in those acquisitions, which it is the design. of history to communicate, and by which the mind should be expanded and strengthened at the same time that it is enriched with facts. Professor Smyth has undertaken to remove these obstacles; and, if we may judge by the manner in which M640829 |