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AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF SCOTLAND," SUPPLEMENT TO LIVES OF EMINENT SCOTSMEN," ETC., ETC.

The history of a country is not exclusively impressed upon its battle-fields. These, indeed, are the great landmarks that first arrest the eye, and over which the popular feeling is most delighted to linger. The deliverance of a land from thraldom, and the heroic deeds through which a small nation has become a great one, are, certainly, of paramount importance, and should therefore be duly commemorated. But the adaptation of a people for these achievements, although a silent and unobtrusive, has also been a most essential process; and its record is to be traced, not upon the heaving surface, but in that under-current of progress by which the people have been borne forward — by which they have been taught the full value of national freedom, and the best modes of securing it. But here some one else than the successful soldier has been at work, and something else than mere military training. The wise and the good, who carried on that improvement, and made each generation better than the preceding, are a country's veritable heroes; — the progress of that improvement is its real history.

But while these are truths so obvious that it seems almost impossible to overlook them, history, as it has hitherto been written, has been too exclusively devoted to military achievements and political movements, without reference to that moral and intellectual progress by which a country emerges from barbarism into civilization, and its people become intelligent, happy, and free. This defect in historical writing has often been felt, and, on two occasions, attempts have been made to produce histories of our own country as they ought to be written. The first of these was Dr. Henry's well-known voluminous but unfinished work; the other the Pictorial History of England, which was an improvement on the plan of Henry. In the present Work an attempt has been made to improve upon both; and the plan which has been followed for that purpose we shall now proceed to specify.