O word of ours is necessary to commend the study of
History to the up-springing generation. History is
the mirror of the past, and the present and the past are so closely connected that we cannot understand the one without we know something of the other.
Among the happiest associations of the writer's childhood is that of learning—from a loving voice now hushed for ever on this side of the grave-stories from history, and connecting them with pictures which he has by him now. When he was very, very young it was his high ambition to write a history of England, and he did it in a small Roman character, as near like print as he could make it; and he issued it in penny numbers—with illustrations of his own and attained the enormous and unprecedented circulation of one copy that is, the manuscript copy ; for he was his own printer and his own publisher, and the one subscriber who took it in was his own father!
That playing at being an author and a printer and a publisher all combined was very pleasant to him more than twenty years ago. When he grew old enough to read and, in a measure, understand grave historians, he saw something of the learning and the labour their work required—to say nothing of the genius they displayed and now to write a history is what he would not venture on upon
any account. But he has thought, with the help of all the best books he could get upon the subject-freely acknowledging his sources of information he might string together some interesting and important events in the ever memorable period which includes the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth