What has been the fate of many fair cities of antiquity, whose nameless ruins encumber the plains of Europe and Asia, and awaken the fruitless inquiry of the traveller? They have sunk into dust and silence,—they have perished from remembrance for want of an historian! The philanthropist may weep over their desolation,—the poet may wander among their mouldering arches and broken columns, and indulge the visionary nights 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 the most of them the time for recording their early history is gone by; their origin, their foundation, together with the eventful period of their youth, are forever 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 wide-spread, 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 forever! 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 arm, and New York on my back, pressing forward, like a gallant commander, to honor and immortality.