PREFACE.

THE few pages which introduce the first volume of this work, added to the concluding lines of the second volume, render any such composition usually called a Preface, in my idea, unnecessary. I have announced my intention of composing a couple of volumes, to be called my Opusculi, which will consist of a great number of essays, tracts, pamphlets, and communications to the periodical press, on a very great variety of subjects;-Philosophy,-Politics,Biography, Chemistry, Geology, — Shooting, Mineralogy, Fishing,-Arms and the Art of War,— Field Fortification,-Steam Mechanics, Electricity, -Cosmogony, &c., &c., &c.

And now I take my leave, requesting the attentive perusal of my bill of fare for the third volume.

May, 1838.

MACERONI.

THE LIFE OF

COLONEL FRANCIS MACERONI.

I HAVE heard it remarked, that we cannot go pleasantly along with the auto-biographer in his recital, unless we have begun our knowledge of him, and prepared our sympathies, by an early, and, as it were, a school-boy acquaintance.

With regard to myself, I feel, that to impart any interest to such details as I must give of my origin and early life, would require the peculiar talent of an accomplished novelist; - of one who, with graphic legerdemain, can expand and adorn, ad libitum, the most simple act or idea connected with his subject, so as to stretch the proper matter for one phrase, into a dozen sprightly pages. Alas! I do not possess one particle of so valuable a faculty. never could write on any other subject than plain matter of fact; and I even fear that the facts which I shall have to give in the first pages of this Book will be but faintly interesting to the majority of my readers.

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It may well be said, that the biographer is to the historian what the mineralogist is to the geologist. The scattered and detached materials, collected and brought to light by the one, are chosen, adapted, and arranged by the other

for the construction of his more stately fabric. Notwithstanding the great abundance of biographic materials, history may still be defined, as it has been of old, "the study of contradictions." The circumstances under which historical facts are usually recorded are so various in respect to the feelings and prejudices of the narrators, as to render it very difficult to obtain a similar account from any two writers albeit, they both were eye-witnesses to the occurrence narrated.

If we go back to the remoter periods of the history of our species, we find the erratic and predatory tribes, called Jews, misrepresenting in their chronicles the most civilized inhabitants of the earth, the Egyptians, Tyrians, Sidonians, and Babylonians. The Tyrians, under the name of Philistines, are charged with every species of moral and political turpitude. The Greeks, in their histories, describe the Medes, and other "barbarians," in any colours but, perhaps, the true. Herodotus, with respect to Egypt, is an exception. The Romans treat their adversaries, especially the Carthaginians, with evident injustice; and the adage of 'punica fides" has been allowed to descend to posterity, only because their ruthless conquerors took good care that no trace of Carthaginian history should remain to give their calumnies the lie. Upon the advent of those "good old times," the "dark ages," which succeeded to the reign of the wholesale murderer Constantine, misnamed "the Great," what statements and counter-statements; what histories and counter-histories; what confusion and destruction of books by way of confuting them, as Origen's refutation of Celsus, &c. Volumes might be composed of historical contradictions, in matters of the greatest interest.

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But with respect to our own times, and the most recent biographies of importance, by which the future historian must be guided to his facts and to his judgments, it is neces