ON MODERN HISTORY, FROM THE IRRUPTION OF THE NORTHERN NATIONS ΤΟ THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Br WILLIAM SMYTH, PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. a THIRD AMERICAN EDITION, REVISED AND CORRECTED. WITH ADDITIONS. INCLUDING A PREFACE, AND A LIST OF BOOKS ON AMERICAN HISTORY BY JARED SPARKS. BOSTON: SANBORN, CARTER AND BAZIN. 1856. BRARY 940 3.7 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by BENJAMIN B. MUSSEY AND COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. 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 his task has been executed in these volumes, it is safe to say that it could not have fallen into more skilful or experienced hands. His object is to teach students, and readers generally, how to read history for themselves; to show them the path, and furnish them the best lights for pursuing it; to enable them to form a just estimate of the principal authors, and |