, and that ceremonies and invocations are still
addressed to them. All this, however, is still too near to be written
about. But it may perhaps some day form a second series of reminiscences
if the present volumes meet with public favour.

As some of my readers (and assuredly a great many of the American) will
find these volumes wanting in personal adventure and lively variety of
experiences, and perhaps dull as regards "incidents," I would remind them
that it is, after all, only the life of a mere literary man and quiet,
humble scholar, and that such existences are seldom very dramatic.
English readers, who are more familiar with such men or literature, will
be less exacting. What I have narrated is nowhere heightened in colour,
retouched in drawing, or made the utmost of for effect, and I might have
gone much further as regards my experiences in politics with the
_Continental Magazine_, and during my connection with Colonel Forney, or
life in the West, and have taken the whole, not more from my memory than
from the testimony of others. But if this work be, as Germans say, at
first too subjective, and devoted too much to mere mental development by
aid of books, the "balance" to come of my life will be found to differ
materially from it, though it is indeed nowhere in any passage exciting.
This present work treats of my infancy in Philadelphia, with some note of
the quaint and beautiful old Quaker city as it then was, and many of its
inhabitants who still remembered Colonial times and Washington's
Republican Court; reminiscences of boyhood in New England; my
revolutionary grandfathers and other relatives, and such men as the last
survivor of the Boston Tea-party (I also saw the last signer of the
Declaration of Independence); an account of my early reading; my college
life at Princeton; three years in Europe passed at the Universities of
Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of
their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the
French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my
subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my
experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the
advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln;
recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a
winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed not devoid
of strange life, though I say