 It is extremely accurate, learned, and concise, and, at the same time, very full of spirit and animation, exhibiting, as it appears to us, a rare union of the patient research and sober judgment which characterize the more laborious class of historians, with the boldness of thinking and force of imagination which is sometimes substituted in their place.It affords us very great pleasure to bear this public testimony to the merits of a writer who has been hitherto unknown, we believe, to the literary world either of this or the neighbouring country; of whom, or of whose existence at least, though residing in the same city with ourselves, it never was our fortune to have heard till his volume was put into our hands; and who, in his first emergence from the humble obscurity in which he has pursued the studies and performed the duties of his profession, has presented the world with a work which may put so many of his contemporaries to the blush, for the big promises they have broken, and the vast opportunities they have neglected.