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.

The remarks into which I have been led at such length will, I trust, not be
set down by the reader to an unworthy egotism, but to their true source, a
desire to correct a misapprehension to which I may have unintentionally
given rise myself, and which has gained me the credit with some--far
from grateful to my feelings, since undeserved--of having surmounted
the incalculable obstacles which lie in the path of the blind man.

Boston, April 2, 1847.



History Of The Conquest Of Peru