PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. & J. HARPER, AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT G115 6396 Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1831, by J. & J. Harper, in the office of the Clerk of the Southern District of NewYork. PREFACE. THE subjects considered in this volume have been so thoroughly sifted by professed antiquaries, that when they were submitted to the present writer, he at once perceived the impossibility of illustrating them by any new facts, while he felt the difficulty of compressing within the narrow limits assigned to him the vast quantity of materials that had been accumulated by his predecessors. Compilation and selection were the principal tasks left to him;-by these means he has endeavoured to condense into one little volume the information that he found dispersed in many; and to present in as popular and pleasing a form as possible, what has been too often encumbered, in more erudite disquisitions, with learned lore and antiquarian pedantry. It is hoped that in thus pruning away the useless. leaves, in order to render the fruit more evident and attractive, little has been sacrificed which, for general purposes, it would have been desirable to retain. In works of this nature, which profess to be little more than summaries and abridgments, it is difficult to hit the happy medium between meager analysis and the fulness of original inquiry. Some readers, in their anxiety for knowledge, will require facts rather than comments; others, who are in search of amusement rather than of information, will prefer deductions and illustrations to minute |