contained, according to the assertion of some persons, the following incredible story. That in the year 1640 the king sent a warrant to sir William Balfour, lieutenant of the tower of London, to execute immediately the earl of Loudon for the crime of high treason, although, as it is well known, it had formerly been pardoned in consequence of a general act of grace; which illegal warrant was to take effect without any previous trial; and that Charles was diverted from insisting on Balfour's obedience to the order, solely by the interference of the marquis of Hamilton. See the Conclusion of Birch's Inquiry into King Charles the First's Transactions with the Earl of Glamorgan, Second Edition, where this tale is brought forward against the king. Let the duke of Hamilton however be heard in his own defence, and at the same time in behalf of his royal master. In his speech before his execution, this nobleman has the following expressions. "I take God to witness, that I "have constantly been a faithful subject and "servant to his late majesty, in spight of all "malice and calumny. I have had the honour since my childhood to attend and be near him, till now of late, and during all "that time I observed in him as many vir

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tues and as little vice, as in any man I ever

"knew." Burnet's Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, p. 398.

III. Thus much concerning the restored passages. To the notes of the earls of Dartmouth and Hardwicke, speaker Onslow, and dean Swift, several others have been added, for the purpose of correction, and of fuller illustration. They are drawn principally from the professed answerers of Burnet, the historians of particular periods of our history, from writers of memoirs and of scarce tracts, and occasionally from manuscript authorities. They were selected and appended to the text, whilst the press was going on, in the course of the last year; and will, it is hoped, as well as the strictures on some doctrines and opinions in the other annotations, appear to owe their situation in the following pages to a zeal for truth, sincere, at least, however mistaken. All these notes are interspersed with the others, and included within a parenthesis.

It is proper to apprise the reader, that Ralph's History of the three first reigns contained in bishop Burnet's work, namely, those of Charles II. James II. and king William, was not procured for consultation before some part of the reign of James II. was already printed. But this circumstance ap

peared afterwards to be of less consequence than the perusal of the latter part of the same history made us apprehend. This historian has obtained from Mr. Fox the praise of impartiality; which he well deserves.

It should also be here acknowledged, that a statement in bishop Burnet's work at pp. 31, 32, of the first volume, ought to have been corrected from the earl of Cromarty's Account of the Conspiracies of the Earls of Gowry, published in 1713. The bishop affirms, that the last earl of Gowry was descended through a daughter of lord Methuen, from Margaret daughter of king Henry the Seventh, although this king's daughter had in reality no issue by her third husband Henry lord Methuen, whom our author erroneously calls Francis Steward, father of a lord Methuen. Gowry's grandmother was daughter of Henry lord Methuen by his second wife, a daughter of the earl of Athol, married to him after Margaret the queen dowager of Scotland's death. See the Earl of Cromarty's Account, p. 8-12. As in this case the earl of Gowry had no well founded claim to the succession of the crown of England, if king James of Scotland were removed out of the way, he could scarcely be influenced by it to attempt the assassination of that prince, according to

the bishop's suggestion, not sanctioned, as he himself owns, by any other historian.

On the other hand a confirmation of our author's testimony has lately occurred, and the question, so ably discussed by sergeant Heywood in his Vindication of Fox's Historical Work, as to the conduct of general Monck during the pending trial of the marquis of Argyle, has been finally set at rest. It now appears, on the authority of sir George Mackenzie, one of the assigned defenders of the marquis, that Monck, when "advertised "of the scantiness of the probation," did actually transmit to Scotland several official letters formerly received by him from the marquis for the purpose of procuring that nobleman's condemnation. See vol. i. p. 217, and sir George Mackenzie's Memoirs of the affairs of Scotland just published, p. 4.

In printing the text of Burnet, the first edition has been followed, and the alterations of his style in subsequent editions have been neglected. It is true, that in the title-page of the first octavo edition, the whole work is said to have been revised and corrected by the editor, the bishop's son; but allowing this, the original MS. was still further departed from, than even in the folio edition. The

few alterations which occur in the editor's Life of his father have been adopted.

The Index to the text of Burnet has been improved by Dr. Bliss, whose name we have already had occasion to mention; the other Index to the principal contents of the notes was entirely prepared by the same gentleman.

The author finished his history of the reigns of Charles II. and James II. about the beginning of the eighteenth century; that of king William, and the former part of queen Anne's reign in 1710. The continuation of the work to the conclusion of peace in 1713 was completed by him in that year; less than two years before his death. The The present year 1823 is nearly the hundredth since the publication of the first volume in folio, comprising the two first reigns above mentioned, together with a summary of public affairs before the restoration. It appears to have excited more interest than the second volume, which followed in 1735, after an interval of eleven years. But this is by no means to be wondered at, considering the author's frequent relations in the subsequent volume of military and foreign affairs in a general and perfunctory manner, and the diminished influence of the good or ill qua