Excerpt from Life and Letters of George Cabot A sentiment of respect for the memory of my great grandfather, and a desire to rescue his name if possible from complete oblivion, induced me to undertake the work of which this volume is the result. The difficulties in my way at first seemed insurmountable. Mr. Cabot, shortly before his death, made an almost complete destruction of all his letters and papers; and I had, therefore, no material for a biography in the best sense of the word. Mr. Cabot's correspondents, however, had preserved his letters; and examination led me to believe that they were of consider able historical value. Selections from these letters form the principal part of this volume. Being debarred by the nature of my only materials from writing a suitable biog raphy, and not considering that a history of any period could be properly treated in a work relating exclusively to an individual, I was forced to confine myself to the task of simply editing those letters which seemed to merit publication. With this object, I have prefixed to each chapter a short account of Mr. Cabot's public life, and of such events as happened during the period covered by the letters and alluded to in them. These introductory passages and the notes as well have been written with the sole purpose of rendering the accompanying letters intelligible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.