PREFACE.

A CONSIDERATION of the time which has elapsed since the commencement of the work, of which a portion is now delivered to the public, has induced the author to venture upon the plan of successive publication. Fifteen years of diligence, interrupted only by the avocations of a collegiate situation, or of parochial duty, constitute such a portion of the exertion of an individual, as may be deemed to justify a wish, that some part of its result should be dismissed as finished.

The present publication comprehends the earlier lectures of a series delivered by the author in the University of Dublin, first as Assistant to the Professor of Modern Histo

ry, and afterwards, when he had accepted a collegiate benefice and resigned his academic situation and offices, as a Lecturer under a special appointment, very liberally made by the Board, and continued during seven years to the termination of the course. The whole consisted of eighty-four lectures, the first of which was read in the month of November in the year 1800, and the last in the month of April in the year 1811. Twenty one of these are now published, containing a review of modern history in the period preceding the fourteenth century. Though this portion is in number of lectures but the fourth part of the whole, it will probably prove to be in magnitude a third, as numerous illustrations have been necessary for clearing the obscurity of early events, as well as for expounding the principles and method of the reasoning employed

in the work.

Of the general design of the course an account is given in the first lecture; but it

may be satisfactory to mention here, in what manner the author was led to form the system, which it proposes to illustrate. Having been appointed Assistant to the Professor of Modern History, he employed himself in seeking for such an arbitrary arrangement and combination, as might give a lucid order to the lectures, which it had become his duty to deliver; and in this enqui

ry he became persuaded that he had disco vered, that for which he was not searching, an intrinsic and essential connection of the events of history, which gave them the coherence and the unity of a moral drama. The scheme therefore which he submits to the public, presented itself to his mind in a search directed towards a different object; if it be unreal, it has at least not been conjured up by the illusion of prejudice.

Few indeed will be found to deny, that the history of a world framed by infinite wisdom must correspond, in the order of its revolutions, to the perfection of the mind by