urope and Asia, and awaken the fruitless
inquiry of the traveler? They have sunk into dust and silence--they have
perished from remembrance for want of a historian! The philanthropist may
weep over their desolation--the poet may wander among their mouldering
arches and broken columns, and indulge the visionary flights of his
fancy--but alas! alas! the modern historian, whose pen, like my own, is
doomed to confine itself to dull matter of fact, seeks in vain among
their oblivious remains for some memorial that may tell the instructive
tale of their glory and their ruin.

"Wars, conflagrations, deluges," says Aristotle, "destroy nations, and
with them all their monuments, their discoveries, and their vanities. The
torch of science has more than once been extinguished and rekindled--a few
individuals, who have escaped by accident, reunite the thread of
generations."

The same sad misfortune which has happened to so many ancient cities will
happen again, and from the same sad cause, to nine-tenths of those which
now flourish on the face of the globe. With most of them the time for
recording their history is gone by: their origin, their foundation,
together with the early stages of their settlement, are for ever buried in
the rubbish of years; and the same would have been the case with this fair
portion of the earth if I had not snatched it from obscurity in the very
nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded were about
entering into the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion--if I had not
dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster's
adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever! And here have I, as
before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip
and scrap, "_punt en punt, gat en gat_," and commenced in this little
work, a history to serve as a foundation on which other historians may
hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until
Knickerbocker's New York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or
Hume and Smollett's England!

And now indulge me for a moment: while I lay down my pen, skip to some
little eminence at the distance of two or three hundred years ahead; and,
casting back a bird's-eye glance over the waste of years that is to roll
between, discover myself--little I--at this moment the progenitor,
prototype, and precursor of them all, posted at the head of this host of
literary worthies, with my book under my