of the reports of State Trials, as they are best known to the
world; namely, in one-and-twenty stately volumes compiled by the
industrious Howells, father and son, and published, a year after the
battle of Waterloo, by the combined efforts of on a few of my
contemporaries the idea that persons long since dead on the block or the
gallows were Englishmen very much like ourselves, my object is secured.

My task has been confined to a selection of passages to be transferred
bodily from Howell's pages; to providing in an abbreviated form the
connecting-links between them; and to the supply of sufficient notes to
enable the ordinary reader to understand the main outlines of the
stories of which the trial generally constitutes the catastrophe. As to
my takings from Howell, I need say but little. I have indicated their
existence by a change of type. I have carefully preserved those
departures from conventional grammar, and that involved and uncouth,
but, for that very reason, life-like style of narration which he and his
predecessors inherited from the original but unknown authorities. As to
my abbreviations, I am fully aware that they do not represent any very
high literary effort. It is, I suppose, impossible that mere
condensation of another man's narrative should be done very well; but it
can certainly be done very ill. My aim, therefore, has been rather to
escape disaster than to achieve any brilliant success. The charm of
State Trials lies largely in matters of detail:--that Hale allowed two
old women to be executed for witchcraft; that Lord Russell was obviously
a traitor; that an eminent judge did not murder a woman in the early
part of his career; and that a sea-captain did murder his brother in
order to inherit his wealth, are in themselves facts of varying
importance. What the trials in these cases tell us, however, as nothing
else can, is what were the popular beliefs as to witchcraft shared by
such a man as Hale; how revolutions were planned while such things were
still an important factor in practical politics; and what was the state
of the second city in the kingdom when a man could be kidnapped in its
busiest streets by a gang of sailors and privateers-men. And this effect
can only be reproduced by considering a mass of detail, picturesque
enough in itself, but not always strictly relevant to the matter in
hand. Again, to a lawyer at all events, it is impossible to omit those
matters which show that the process