Some people have very strange notions of the duties of the historian and the biographer. They fancy that our part is to suppress or distort the truth, and to substitute flattery for it; that we should deal in sickening and nauseous eulogy only,— “In sugar and spice, And all that’s nice,”— and exert our energies in the vain effort to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, or to make deal boards out of sawdust. The child, walking in the churchyard, and reading the epitaphs, exclaimed, “Mother, where do they bury the bad people, for I can only find the good ones here?” But we are not epitaph-mongers, we are not flattery-spinners, we are not eulogy-penners. We are not, we never were, a society of angels, and we take men as we find them. We are not making a collection of fancy sketches, to be all beauties. We are forming a cabinet of likenesses. We took up our pen with this end in view, and we shall continue to work it out. We shall tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” We shall “nothing extenuate, and nought set down in malice,” but state facts as facts, call a spade a spade, and describe men as they were, not as they ought to have been. We have, of course, an object in these prefatory remarks. We have. It seems that certain, it may be well-intentioned, or it may be over squeamish, censors and critics are bombarding us with good advice, to the effect that we ought in chronicling the past to praise everybody; in other words, as we have already hinted, to write epitaphs, not history. But, once for all, we beg leave to state that we are not going to take this advice. We have, however, two propositions to make in answer to it. The first is, that those amiable persons who are shocked by our plain speaking, should just skip our effusions; or, if that does not satisfy them, we will surrender our task and pen and inkstand altogether to them, and allow them to begin with the next chapter, and carry our work to a conclusion in their own fashion, which we doubt not will be infinitely superior to our way of putting our rough notes together, and stating our homely thoughts in homely language. We trust that this offer will be accepted. We would rather be learners than teachers, and shall be delighted to be convinced that every common councilman of the last generation was a Chesterfield and an Adonis, and every merchant a Lindley Murray and an Admirable Crichton, miracles of wit, literature and learning. But we, at all events, are not the Plutarch to record the mythology, not the history, of these impossible prodigies and inconceivable wonders. And now we proceed, until our critics volunteer to supersede us. But, verily, as we return to our work, _vires acquirit eundo_, it grows upon our hands. When first we undertook it, we had a notion that we could in a brace of chapters dot down all our reminiscences of the times we speak of. But here we are now, in Chapter XII, with as yet no port in view, and