posit; but many documents of important
bearing on the subject are to be found scattered in public and private
libraries, chiefly in France and Canada. The task of collection has
proved abundantly irksome and laborious. It has, however, been greatly
lightened by the action of the governments of New York, Massachusetts,
and Canada, in collecting from Europe copies of documents having more or
less relation to their own history. It has been greatly lightened, too,
by a most kind co-operation, for which the writer owes obligations too
many for recognition at present, but of which he trusts to make fitting
acknowledgment hereafter. Yet he cannot forbear to mention the name of
Mr. John Gilmary Shea of New York, to whose labors this department of
American history has been so deeply indebted, and that of the Hon. Henry
Black of Quebec. Nor can he refrain from expressing his obligation to
the skilful and friendly criticism of Mr. Charles Folsom.

In this, and still more must it be the case in succeeding volumes, the
amount of reading applied to their composition is far greater than the
citations represent, much of it being of a collateral and illustrative
nature. This was essential to a plan whose aim it was, while
scrupulously and rigorously adhering to the truth of facts, to animate
them with the life of the past, and, so far as might be, clothe the
skeleton with flesh. If, at times, it may seem that range has been
allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest
details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on
personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research,
however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be
detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken
as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue
himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in
their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of
those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or
a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in
the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer's aim to
exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would
be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope
that, so far at least as relates to the present