PREFACE. Ir is a fact, which cannot have escaped observation, that while French literature abounds with private memoirs and personal anecdote, our own is deplorably deficient in agreeable chronicles of this nature. To the author, or rather compiler, of this work, the want appeared to be less owing to the absence of materials, than to a requisite diligence in bringing them to light; in a word, that there existed a supply of latent stores in our own language (buried, as it were, among voluminous records and forgotten pamphlets) sufficient to form a succinct social history of distinguished VOL. I. a 3 characters, who figure more every portion of our annals. or less in With this view of the subject, it occurred to the author, that the private history of the Reigns of the Stuarts and of the Protectorate, their families, and others intimately connected with the Court,-would present a series of agreeable and instructive anecdotes; would furnish the means of introducing the reader to the principal personages of their day, and of exhibiting the Monarch and the Statesman in their undress; while, at the same time, it would afford an insight into human character, and a picture of the manners of the age. It could not escape the author, that some of the anecdotes contained in the present volumes, have already appeared in more than one popular work of modern date. But it would have been impossible for him to follow out his intended plan, and to give |