Copy 1, Volume 1

A history of the Highlands and of the Highland clans / by James Browne ... ; illustrated by a series of portraits and other illustrative engravings.

  • James Browne
Date:
1836-1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of the Highlands and of the Highland clans / by James Browne ... ; illustrated by a series of portraits and other illustrative engravings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/552 (page 7)
    ADDRESS. Tue grand object of this work, the merit of the design of which belongs exclusively to my intelligent and enterprising publishers, is to exhibit, in the most attractive form possible, a comprehensive digest of all that is known, or deserving of being recorded, on the interesting subject which it is intended to illustrate. Much has already been written and published on the Highlands generally, as well as on the manners, customs, habits, feelings, superstitions, character, condition, and martial achievements of that people, who, from a period long anterior to the dawn of authentic history, occupied the mountains and the glens of the Alpine region included within the Grampian boundary; and there is scarcely any separate branch of the subject which some one has not appropriated and overlaid with a mass of disproportionate and oppressive details. But of the crowd of writers who, at different times, have expatiated in the various portions of this ample field, many have been actuated by the strongest prejudices of nationality, whilst others, careless of facts, have sought to exhibit the embellishments of romance rather than the truth of history, and a few have laboured with perverse industry, to vilify, misrepresent, and traduce the country and the people which they pro- fessed to describe; and, at all events, no work has as yet appeared in which the subject of the Highlands and the Highlanders has been treated ef in all its branches, or to which reference may conveniently and safely be made for such information as it must be desirable for the public to have presented to them in an agreeable and accessible form. © To sup- ply this desideratum,—to concentrate and combine the knowledge which at present lies seattered over an immense surface, and throughout a vast variety of publieations,—to interweave with what is already known and ascertained a large body of information derived from new sources and hitherto inedited documents,—to apply the laws of evidence and the lights of philosophy to the investigation of subjects which have too long been viewed through the exaggerating media of ignorance, prejudice, or national vanity,—and to replace within the pale of history characters ———VoO CC ee ee a Re eee ol a rita ot aber” © oF ia. ry, A Ai