Preserve your Loyalty, maintain your Rights.
Inscription on a Column at Appleby.
| Transcriber's Note: The variant and inconsistent spellings in this text have been retained and Tables of Contents have been created for each volume. |
| VOLUME I. | VOLUME II. | VOLUME III. |
VOLUME I.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abate the edge of Traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again,
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Shakspeare.
Those who have but an indifferent banquet to offer, are not usually inclined to discourage their guests, by a repulsive bill of fare; yet surely, when a public invitation is given, there is honesty, and prudence too, in simply stating the kind of regale we are going to spread, lest a palled and sickly appetite should expect stimulants, or a perverted taste should pine for foreign luxuries and modern cookery, when we have nothing to set before them but plain old English food. Church and King now look as obsolete in a publication, as beef and pudding would at a gala dinner; yet let us remember, that as the latter have fed our heroes from the days of Cressy and Agincourt to the present times, so the former have fashioned minds fit to animate these mighty bodies. It is only to those who have a relish for stern virtue and grave reflection, that I would recommend the following pages.
I have dated this narrative in a peculiarly calamitous period, though well aware that virtue, like happiness, is supposed to flourish most in times of tranquility. Such times afford no subjects for the historian or the bard; and even the moralist is often led to revert rather to those stormy eras which roused the energies of the human s