PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

As an evidence that ’tis very probable these Memorials were written many years ago, the persons now concerned in the publication assure the reader that they have had them in their possession finished, as they now appear, above twenty years; that they were so long ago found by great accident, among other valuable papers, in the closet of an eminent public minister, of no less figure than one of King William’s secretaries of state.

As it is not proper to trace them any farther, so neither is there any need to trace them at all, to give reputation to the story related, seeing the actions here mentioned have a sufficient sanction from all the histories of the times to which they relate, with this addition, that the admirable manner of relating them and the wonderful variety of incidents with which they are beautified in the course of a private gentleman’s story, add such delight in the reading, and give such a lustre, as well to the accounts themselves as to the person who was the actor, that no story, we believe, extant in the world ever came abroad with such advantage.

It must naturally give some concern in the reading that the name of a person of so much gallantry and honour, and so many ways valuable to the world, should be lost to the readers.  We assure them no small labour has been thrown away upon the inquiry, and all we have been able to arrive to of discovery in this affair is, that a memorandum was found with this manuscript, in these words, but not signed by any name, only the two letters of a name, which gives us no light into the matter, which memoir was as follows:—­

Memorandum.

“I found this manuscript among my father’s writings, and I understand that he got them as plunder, at, or after, the fight at Worcester, where he served as major of ——­’s regiment of horse on the side of the Parliament.  I.K.”

As this has been of no use but to terminate the inquiry after the person, so, however, it seems most naturally to give an authority to the original of the work, viz., that it was born of a soldier; and indeed it is through every part related with so soldierly a style, and in the very language of the field, that it seems impossible anything but the very person who was present in every action here related, could be the relater of them.

The accounts of battles, the sieges, and the several actions of which this work is so full, are all recorded in the histories of those times; such as the great battle of Leipsic, the sacking of Magdeburg, the siege of Nuremburg, the passing the river Lech in Bavaria; such also as the battle of Kineton, or Edgehill, the battles of Newbury, Marston Moor, and Naseby, and the like:  they are all, we say, recorded in other histories, and written by those who lived in those times, and perhaps had good authority for what they wrote.  But do those relations give any of the