This great work was originally published in 1827. Since that period the author has made many additions to it. The present edition is printed from the latest London issue, in 1846, and is therefore the best and most complete edition in the country. The Harpers have printed it in clear, readable type, on good paper, and have placed it at a price so moderate as to bring it within the means of the humblest student. Of the value and importance of the work it is hardly necessary to speak, as it has forced reluctant praise even from those whose principles and policy it condemns. It has taken a prominent place among those standard books which no library can be supposed to be without. There are probably few books since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which have equaled this in the task of demolishing prejudice, and guiding public opinion aright. The space of political history which the volume occupies, has long been the battle-ground of opposing sects, factions, and parties. Historians, who have explored it most successfully, have generally been unduly influenced by their political or religious prejudices, in their accounts of events and estimates of persons. The Whig and the Tory, the Catholic, the Churchman, and the Puritan, each has bent the truth of history to the purposes of party, and accommodated, like poets, the shows of things to the desires of the mind. This has turned English political history into historical romance. Cranmer, Burleigh, Charles I., Strafford, Laud, Hampden, Cromwell, Sidney, Marlborough, Somers, Sunderland, have been so often passed from the partisan who daubs to the partisan who damns, as to appear like the heroes of bad novels, rather than mortal men.