PREFACE.
UR present Volume opens upon a new and brilliant phase of English History. After a bloodless Revolution, a new dynasty, whose title to power is founded in the choice of the People, succeeds the arbitrary and senseless misgovernment of the House of Stuart. The vigorous attempts of the exiled Royal Family to regain their lost throne are, one after another, crushed out; and the Act of Settlement fixes the succession definitely in the House of Hanover. In the meantime England is rising to a foremost place among the nations of the earth. The successes of Marlborough throughout the wars in the Low Countries raise the military fame of the nation to a height never before attained; while in the arts of peace it is not less renowned. Newton astonishes the world by his exposition of the laws of Nature; Swift, Pope, Addison, Steele, and a host of others, inaugurate the Augustan age of our literature; and Walpole and Bolingbroke lay the foundations of modern statesmanship. As the history of the period advances, its interest becomes more and more intense. A few fortified outposts on the coast of India develop into a vast empire; and the spirit and bravery of a few commercial clerks establish our ascendancy in Asia. The times that follow these are the most momentous, the most gigantic in their developments, and thrilling in their interest, which the history of the whole world has to present. In the very beginning of our next volume opens up the great North American Revolution, by which this country lost a colony, and the world gained a great and independent nation;—a vast field of new existence, to which the oppressed and destitute of all lands could flee, and amalgamate and grow into a new and most interesting world.
Close on the skirts of the romantic and inspiriting transactions of the American War of Independence rises the sombre and sublime story of the French Revolution,—the most peculiar and awfully interesting of all human events. From the midst of this tragic condition rolls forth, like a torrent of burning lava from a blazing volcano, the great European War, convulsing all nations, overturning nearly all thrones, devastating almost the whole surface of Europe, and presenting to our astonished gaze the lurid career of the most surprising conqueror in the world's history. No romance can bear any comparison with the history of the rise, triumphs, and fall of Napoleon I. We can find no such wild extremes, no such moral for ambitious kings, as those expressed in Lord Byron's "Ode to Napoleon:"—
"'Tis done—but yesterday a king!
And arm'd with kings to strive—
and now thou art a nameless thing:
So abject—yet alive!
Is this the man of thousand thrones,
Who strew'd our earth with hostile bones.
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.
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