Excerpt from History of England, From the Earliest to the Present Time, Vol. 1 of 5: In Five Volumes To do SO would require not five, but fifty volumes. A full English History is certainly a desideratum in our literature, and in our apparatus for political life. But, even if it existed, a book on the plan of the present one would not be useless. Where a large long book is read by tens, a book of moderate size will be read by hundreds. But it must be a real History and to be this, it must omit nothing that is essential for clear knowledge and sound judgment; and it must be something more than a dry compendium of dates and facts, or a series of disjointed essays. It must have animation as well as accuracy. It must have unity and entirety of organism and purpose and it must have artistic proportions. Moreover, even as the biography of an individual is valueless without some knowledge of those with whom he had dealings, and of the society in which he moved, it is necessary to accompany the history of any one State with sketches of other States, and of the general progress of events in the civilised world. All this is to be done. Whether I have done or can do it, is, of course, a very different matter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.