But the chief merit on which I value myself, and found my hopes for future regard, is that faithful veracity with which I have compiled this invaluable little work; carefully winnowing away the chaff of hypothesis, and discarding the tares of fable, which are too apt to spring up and choke the seeds of truth and wholesome knowledge.  Had I been anxious to captivate the superficial throng, who skim like swallows over the surface of literature; or had I been anxious to commend my writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions.  But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvelous adventure, whereby the drowsy ear of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealously maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity which should ever distinguish the historian.  “For a writer of this class,” observes an elegant critic, “must sustain the character of a wise man writing for the instruction of posterity; one who has studied to inform himself well, who has pondered his subject with care, and addresses himself to our judgment rather than to our imagination.”

Thrice happy, therefore, is this our renowned city, in having incidents worthy of swelling the theme of history; and doubly thrice happy is it in having such an historian as myself to relate them.  For, after all, gentle reader, cities of themselves, and, in fact, empires of themselves, are nothing without an historian.  It is the patient narrator who records their prosperity as they rise—­who blazons forth the splendor of their noontide meridian—­who props their feeble memorials as they totter to decay—­who gathers together their scattered fragments as they rot—­and who piously, at length, collects their ashes into the mausoleum of his work, and rears a triumphant monument to transmit their renown to all succeeding ages.

What has been the fate of many fair cities of antiquity, whose nameless ruins encumber the plains of Europe and Asia, and awaken the fruitless inquiry of the traveler?  They have sunk into dust and silence—­they have perished from remembrance for want of a historian!  The philanthropist may weep over their desolation—­the poet may wander among their mouldering arches and broken columns, and indulge the visionary flights of his fancy—­but alas! alas! the modern historian, whose pen, like my own, is doomed to confine itself to dull matter of fact, seeks in vain among their oblivious remains for some memorial that may tell the instructive tale of their glory and their ruin.

“Wars, conflagrations, deluges,” says Aristotle, “destroy nations, and with them all their monuments, their discoveries, and their vanities.  The torch of science has more than once been extinguished and rekindled—­a few individuals, who have escaped by accident, reunite the thread of generations.”