Manna-hata, the handsomest and most pleasant country that man can HENRY HUDSON. behold. The Island of New-York is the most beautiful island that I have ever HESSIAN OFFICER, in "Stone's Revolutionary Letters," 1891. seen. She is a Mart of Nations. . . . The crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth. ISAIAH, xxiii. History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs, privileging him with the experience of age without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. THOMAS FULLER. This is a great fault in a chronicler, to turn parasite: an absolute history should be in fear of none; neither should he write anything more than truth, for friendship, or else for hate, but keep himself equal and constant in all his discourses. SIMON N. H. LINGUET. Industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of the monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private recordes and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes that concern not story, and the like, we doe save and recover somewhat from the deluge of Time. FRANCIS BACON. They who make researches into Antiquity may be said to passe often through many dark lobbies and dusky places before they come to the Aula lucis, the great hall of light; they must repair to old Archives and peruse many molded and moth-eaten records, and so bring to light, as it were, out of darkness, to inform the present world what the former did, and make us see truth through our Ancestor's eyes. JAMES HOWELL. I was surprised to find how few, if any, of my fellow-citizens were aware that New-York had ever been called New Amsterdam, or had heard of the names of its early Dutch governors, or cared a straw about their ancient Dutch progenitors. . . . A history to serve as a foundation, on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's New-York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollett's England. WASHINGTON IRVING. ... |