THE AMERICAN QUARTERLY REGISTER. CONDUCTED BY B. B. EDWARDS AND W. COGSWELL. VOL. XI. PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SOCIETY. BOSTON: PRINTED BY PERKINS & MARVIN. 1839. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1839, by WILLIAM COGSWELL, Secretary of the American Education Society, in behalf of said Society, in the Clerk's PREFACE TO VOLUME XI. We have been sus- We now bring our labors for another year to a close. tained by the hope that they are not altogether in vain. contain many articles which are more immediately interesting than the mass of those which are inserted in the American Quarterly Register. Our object is not so much to entertain the passing hour, as it is to collect and arrange materials for thought which will be permanently useful. Some of the articles inserted in the eleven volumes of our work will be of indispensable importance, we may presume to say, many years hence. They have been prepared with an exhausting amount of labor, and in some cases, from sources which are exceedingly rare, and which will soon cease to exist. For instance, our excellent friend and fellowlaborer, John Farmer, Esq., who has, during the last year, gone down to the grave, was in the possession of stores of information, with much of which he enriched our pages, that will be sought in vain elsewhere, or at any future time. Invaluable records are frequently lost, or burned, and they inevitably decay in the lapse of time. In rescuing, therefore, some of this perishing information from utter loss, we cannot but feel that we are doing good service to our country, and to the churches of our Lord. We interfere with no other publication; we come into collision with no class of our fellow men. In the statistical department of our labor, our concern is not so much with the living, as it is with the pious and venerated dead-with the noble and sainted men, to whom, under God, we owe our inestimable civil and religious institutions. We enter on the duties of another year with undiminished zeal. We hope, with the cooperation of several learned antiquaries and other estimable writers, to render the ensuing volume more worthy of patronage than either of its predecessors. We have a large amount of valuable materials in preparation, on a variety of subjects. If our labors shall contribute to the well-being of our country, to the diffusion of useful information, and especially to the raising up of a pious and efficient ministry, we shall have reason to be abundantly satisfied. BOSTON, MAY, 1839. |