PREFACE.

THE present has to do with the past, and until we make ourselves familiar with the past we are not prepared to understand the present. All history takes us back into the ages long ago, and so manifold are the means of becoming acquainted with the nations and the people that existed before us, that ignorance becomes a sin. If the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing-if we are ever seeking something new and something more, then it is our duty to supply the mind with all the knowledge which it desires or which it can take in.

We have been sent into this world to live and to act; and it is for the good of the world, as well as for our own happiness, that we live rightly and act worthily. Nations are made up of individuals; and it is the individual character which goes to make up the character of a nation. This is a fact which all history proves. It reveals the influence of good or of evil in society: -it teaches us that the stability or the overthrow of states and empires depends on their virtue or their vice, and that this virtue or this vice is dependent on the life and the character of every individual man. If we love

our country, we must love goodness; while the fate of those nations which have long since perished and disappeared, will lead us to place a higher and a fuller value upon all that is pure and true. May our hearts be kept uncorrupt, and our lives be sublime in virtue and in goodness!

RYDE, AUGUST, 1854.

R. F.