Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE lectures which compose the present volume were delivered at the Lowell Institute, in Boston, Massachusetts, in the autumn and winter of 1860 -1861, and they are now published, for the benefit of the author, by the liberal permission of the Trustees of that noble foundation. They were prepared in the summer preceding, with such aids only as my private library afforded; and my departure from the United States in the spring of 1861, together with the want of access to collections of English books abroad, has prevented me from giving them such a revision as I hoped to be able to bestow upon them. They are printed, therefore, very nearly as they were originally written; and I have not thought myself bound to suppress opinions advanced, or illustrations employed, in the delivery of the lectures, barely because they are published under circumstances different from those in which they were read.

It is proper to add that the frequent references in