FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE TENTH TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. BY C. M. DAVIES. Onward methinks, and diligently slow, GOLDSMITH'S Traveller. VOLUME THE FIRST. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER, WEST STRAND. M.DCCC.XLI. PREFACE. Ar a period such as the present, when the general appetite for knowledge is at once quickened and satiated by all that is pungent in wit, delicate in sentiment, rich in learning, and novel in science-when, by the plastic hand of modern invention, history herself is made to suit the alluring garb of romance-it is with diffidence that I solicit attention to a work which has nothing but fidelity to recommend it, and of which the subject, deeply interesting in itself, but deficient perhaps in some of the subsidiary attractions incidental to historical narrative, requires a pen of more than ordinary ability to do it justice. It is not an overweening vanity or presumption that has prompted me on this occasion; not that, unawed by the high and grave duties of an historian, I have ventured upon them in wanton recklessness, or blind ignorance of my own incapacity, or touched without trembling the very lowest hem of the mantle of Livy and Tacitus; but in the conviction that it is the duty of every one to cast his mite, however humble, into the treasury of human knowledge; in the consciousness that if I shall have done little to enlighten, I have in no one instance wilfully contributed to the propagation or continuance of error; in the hope of proving useful to those who, like myself, have felt the disadvantage to which the English reader of history is subject, of knowing nothing of the internal government, constitution, laws, and habits of a people, whose name, celebrated throughout the world, is to be met with on nearly every page of the history of Europe. It is with the view of presenting this knowledge in a compendious form that the following Work has been composed, of which, as I have said, the chief recommendation is fidelity; and, in order that my |