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PREFACE

BY THE EDITOR.

AS biography is a species of history which records the lives and characters of remarkable persons, it consequently becomes an interesting subject, and is of general utility. It would be but fair to assert, that almost every civilized nation on the globe has, at one period or other, produced distinguished individuals in various stations of life.

Mr Jefferson, the President of the United States of America, in his "Notes on Virginia," thus speaks in answer to the assertion of the Abbe Raynal, that "America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius, in a single art, or a single science."-"When we shall have existed as a nation," says Mr J. "as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name in the roll of poets. In war we have produced a Washington, whose memory will be adored while liberty shall have votaries; whose name will triumph over time, and will in future ages assume its just station among the most celebrated worthies of the world, when that wretched philosophy shall be forgotten hich would arrange him among the degene racies of nature. In physics, we have produced a FRANKLIN, than whom no one of the present age has

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