the vicissitudes
of right and wrong, neither depressed by detection, nor abashed by
confutation, proud of the hourly increase of infamy, and ready to boast
of all the contumelies that falsehood and slander may bring upon them,
as new proofs of their zeal and fidelity.

With these heroes we have no ambition to be numbered; we leave to the
confessors of faction the merit of their sufferings, and are desirous to
shelter ourselves under the protection of truth. That all our facts will
be authentick, or all our remarks just, we dare not venture to promise:
we can relate but what we hear, we can point out but what we see. Of
remote transactions, the first accounts are always confused, and
commonly exaggerated: and in domestick affairs, if the power to conceal
is less, the interest to misrepresent is often greater; and, what is
sufficiently vexatious, truth seems to fly from curiosity, and as many
inquiries produce many narratives, whatever engages the publick
attention is immediately disguised by the embellishments of fiction. We
pretend to no peculiar power of disentangling contradiction or denuding
forgery, we have no settled correspondence with the antipodes, nor
maintain any spies in the cabinets of princes. But as we shall always be
conscious that our mistakes are involuntary, we shall watch the gradual
discoveries of time, and retract whatever we have hastily and
erroneously advanced.

In the narratives of the daily writers every reader perceives somewhat
of neatness and purity wanting, which, at the first view, it seems easy
to supply; but it must be considered, that those passages must be
written in haste, and, that there is often no other choice, but that
they must want either novelty or accuracy; and that, as life is very
uniform, the affairs of one week are so like those of another, that by
any attempt after variety of expression, invention would soon be
wearied, and language exhausted. Some improvements, however, we hope to
make; and for the rest we think that, when we commit only common faults,
we shall not be excluded from common indulgence.

The accounts of prices of corn and stocks are to most of our readers of
more importance than narratives of greater sound; and, as exactness is
here within the reach of diligence, our readers may justly require it
from us.

Memorials of a private and personal kind, which relate deaths,
marriages, and preferments, must always be imperfect by omission, and
often erroneous