ADVERTISEMENT. The author has not failed to make use of the opportunity afforded him by the Third Edition, to revise the work throughout. The alterations however that he has made, though numerous, are not of a fundamental nature. Their object has been merely to remove a few of the crude and juvenile remarks, which, upon consideration, he thought himself able to detect, in the book as it originally stood. JULY 1797.
Note: Godwin wrote this piece, according to a note in the manuscript, "while the Enquirer was in the press, under the impression that the favor of the public might have demanded another volume." The study of history may well be ranked among those pursuits which are most worthy to be chosen by a rational being. The study of history divides itself into two principal branches; the study of mankind in a mass, of the progress the fluctuations, the interests and the vises of society; and the study of the individual. The history of a nation might be written in the first of these senses, entirely in terms of abstraction, and without descending so much as to name one of those individuals to which the nation is composed. It is curious, and it is impo... (From : Anarchy Archives.)