I have the honour to be, My Lord Duke, Your Grace’s most obliged, And most humble, obedient servant, HENRY DIRCKS. BLACKHEATH, KENT, January, 1865. PREFACE. That a Memoir of the Inventor of the Steam Engine, should appear for the first time two hundred years after his decease, is an occurrence in our literature, which, of itself, might almost be considered sufficient to arouse public inquiry in respect to such a production. But far more solid ground exists for believing that the great country which gave birth to the Inventor, and his Invention of one of man’s noblest productions in art, will peruse it with true national pride, when assured of the amount and strength of the evidence now first adduced to establish those claims which, although never entirely doubted, yet have hitherto borne too misty and mythical a character to satisfy common comprehension. The labour encountered in carrying out the required design may be appreciated from the fact, that the present work has been to a great extent the study of thirty years, although literally completed within only the last few years. This field of inquiry has been, consequently, long open to more ambitious pens, and sooner or later would, no doubt, have received, as it demands--the attention of men of letters and of science. Probably no other country furnishes so singular a fact, as that of being for two centuries without information much better than tradition, and accumulated diversities of opinions freely indulged in, respecting the political and private character, and inventive talent of one of its most remarkable, interesting, and glorious benefactors. And, during so long a period, in consequence of such defective and conflicting information, producing the most absurd and unreliable statements, even on the most ordinary points of individual history. In the whole range of English biography, within the same period of time, no important memoir has ever been so mythical as that of Edward Somerset, second Marquis of Worcester.