Nor can I cheer
myself with the delusive expectation, that, impaired as the organ has
become, from having been tasked, probably, beyond its strength, it can
ever renew its youth, or be of much service to me hereafter in my literary
researches. Whether I shall have the heart to enter, as I had proposed, on
a new and more extensive field of historical labor, with these
impediments, I cannot say. Perhaps long habit, and a natural desire to
follow up the career which I have so long pursued, may make this, in a
manner, necessary, as my past experience has already proved that it is
practicable.
From this statement--too long, I fear, for his patience--the reader, who
feels any curiosity about the matter, will understand the real extent of my
embarrassments in my historical pursuits. That they have not been very
light will be readily admitted, when it is considered that I have had but a
limited use of my eye, in its best state, and that much of the time I have
been debarred from the use of it altogether. Yet the difficulties I have
had to contend with are very far inferior to those which fall to the lot of a
blind man. I know of no historian, now alive, who can claim the glory of
having overcome such obstacles, but the author of "La Conquete de
l'Angleterre par les Normands"; who, to use his own touching and
beautiful language, "has made himself the friend of darkness"; and who,
to a profound philosophy that requires no light but that from within,
unites a capacity for extensive and various research, that might well
demand the severest application of the student.
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