having been an officer in the militia, and a member of the House of Commons. The remark is most just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaigns, though he never saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and at mess in Hampshire, or on the Treasury bench and at Brooke's, during the storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might have enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he never could have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp, and the senate-house. In this respect Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh had great advantages over almost every English historian since the time of Burnet."-I can say I have these advantages. I was in the Senate the whole time of which I write an active business member, attending and attentive-in the confidence of half the administrations, and a close observer of the others—had an inside view of transactions of which the public only saw the outside, and of many of which the two sides were very different-saw the secret springs and hidden machinery by which men and parties were to be moved, and measures promoted or thwarted-saw patriotism and ambition at their respective labors, and was generally able to discriminate between them. So far, I have one qualification; but Mr. Macaulay says that Lord Lyttleton had the same, and made but a poor history, because unable to use his material. So it may be with me; but in addition to my senatorial means of knowledge, I have access to the unpublished papers of General Jackson, and find among them some that he intended for publication, and which will be used according to his intention.

3. THE SCOPE OF THE WORK.

I do not propose a regular history, but a political work, to show the practical working of the government, and speak of men and events in subordination to that design, and to illustrate the character of Institutions which are new and complex-the first of their kind, and upon the fate of which the eyes of the world are now fixed. Our duplicate form of government, State and Federal, is a novelty which has no precedent, and has found no practical imitation, and is still believed by some to be an experiment. I believe in its excellence, and wish to contribute to its permanence, and believe I can do so by giving a faithful account of what I have seen of its working, and of the trials to which I have seen it subjected.

4. THE SPIRIT OF THE WORK.

I write in the spirit of Truth, but not of unnecessary or irrelevant truth, only giving that which is essential to the object of the work, and the omission of which would be an imperfection, and a subtraction from what ought to be known. I have no animosities, and shall find far greater pleasure in bringing out the good and the great acts of those with whom I have differed, than in noting the points on which I deemed them wrong. My ambition is to make a veracious work, reliable in its statements, candid in its conclusions, just in its views, and which cotemporaries and posterity may read without fear of being misled.