The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies, Vol. 5 of 5 als Taschenbuch von G. A. Thompson - Livres de poche

Excerpt from The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies, Vol. 5 of 5: Containing an Entire Translation of the Spanish Work of Colonel Don Antonio De Alcedo, Captain of the Royal Spanish Guards, and Member of the Royal Academy of History: With Large Additions and Compilations From Modern Voyages and Travels, and From Origina The writers of every age have been inclined to represent their own as inferior to those which preceded it. No writer of the present day, however, can with reason complain that he has been called on either to act in, or to behold, a drama destitute, at least, of incident. The great theatre of human life has for the last fifty years exhibited in rapid succession transactions of such extraordinary novelty, of such perplexing intricacy, of such terrific grandeur, and of such increasing interest, that he must be destitute of feeling as well as of reflection, who is capable of regarding them without an earnest wish to trace them to the causes in which they originated, and to the consequences in which they are likely to terminate. Whichever course he pursues, whether retrograde or prospective, he will find that part of the swelling scene, which has been laid in the old world, much more intelligible and of easier explication than that which is supplied by the new. In contemplating the former portion of the drama, he will be aided by all the lights which ardent inquiry and unfettered communication have, during a course of many centuries, been able to throw on it. In considering the latter, he will find himself obstructed, not only by the obscurity naturally belonging to his subject, but by that in which the art of man has purposely laboured to involve it. To assist in dispelling this darkness has been my principal motive for engaging in the work I now offer to the public. When Buonaparte, in the year 1808, entered Spain, the curtain, as it drew up, discovered, even to the most inattentive spectator, and by no means in the ba