The book contains long passages of older French in which the reader will notice many flaws in grammar, spelling and accents. These may make some of the French difficult to read but it will be obvious that this cannot be fixed without sometimes inadvertently changing the intended meaning. For that reason all passages in French are presented unchanged in this transcription. Similarly with the passages in Italian and Spanish. For the rest of the text, the many inconsistencies in English spelling, capitalisation, and hyphenation have been left unchanged except where noted below. Other minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Page xxviii – “or” changed to “of” (a contemporary of) Page 93 – “nay” changed to “any” (scarce any account of her) Page 126 – “may” changed to “many” (how many stages) Page 138 – “Fontainbleau” changed to “Fontainebleau” (at Fontainebleau) Page 259 – “Randam” changed to “Randan” (Madame de Randan) Page 290 – “Cnæus” changed to “Gnæus” (Gnæus Pompeius) —————————— The numbered references to endnotes on the pages of the book are incorrect in most cases. Many other pages of the book should have had references to endnotes but those references are missing. In order to reindex the references in this transcription, a temporary ‘placeholder’ reference was added to those pages where there should have been at least one numbered reference to endnotes but it was omitted in the book. The transcriber has retained these placeholder references as they are helpful to the reader. Placeholder references are distinguished by an asterisk next to the index number (as in [99*], for example). Their role is exactly the same as that of the references originally present in the book; namely to direct the reader to the correct page header in the endnotes. Under that page header will be found all the author’s notes relevant to the page. Where originally there were more than one numbered reference to endnotes on a page of the book, these now have the same index number in this transcription. That index number links to the respective page header in the endnotes. Endnotes have been reformatted so that each separate note is distinguished by a prefixing ◆ character.