In the arrangement of a plan for presenting the result of these labors to the public in an acceptable form many difficulties were perceptible. Other histories of our Revolution had been written, embellished, and read; what could be produced more attractive than they? The exciting literature of the day, ranging in its intoxicating character from the gross pictures of sensual life drawn by the French writers of fiction, to the more refined, but not less intoxicating works of popular and esteemed novelists, so cheaply published and so widely diffused, has produced a degree of mental dissipation throughout our land, destructive, in its tendency, to sober and rational desires for imbibing useful knowledge. Among the young, where this dissipation is most rife, and deleterious in its effects, it seemed most desirable to have the story of our Revolution known and its salutary teachings pondered and improved, for they will be the custodians of our free institutions when the active men of the present generation shall step aside into the quiet shadows of old age. Next to tales of love and gallantry, the young mind is most charmed by the narratives of the traveler. The woof of our history is too sacred to be interwoven with the tinsel filling of fiction, and we should have too high a regard for truth to seek the potential aid of its counterfeit in gaining audience in the ear of the million; but to the latter taste we may consistently pay court, and in behalf of sober history, use its {xvii}taken from the cloisters of the South and placed within their temples, and upon dreary and desolate Iceland and Norway civilization erected its humanizing altars. Ardent, imaginative, and devotional, they eagerly accepted Christianity, and it became to them really a "Star in the East," leading to where "the infant Jesus laid." It was not to them sr much a personal treasure to he valued for its immortal blessings, as a glorious idea full of temporal advantage. It became an intense passion, not a sober belief, and its warmth generated mighty events. Among them the spirit of chivalry had its birth and early nurture, and in those unholy wars against the possessors of the land of Palestine and of the sepulcher of Christ, called the Crusades, which shook the nations during three consecutive centuries, these Northmen furnished the bravest leaders.