But, fortunately, his ill tidings came too late to ruffle the tranquillity of this most tranquil of rulers.

His venerable Excellency had just breathed and smoked his last; his lungs and his pipe having been exhausted together, and his peaceful soul having escaped in the last whiff that curled from his tobacco pipe.

In a word, the renowned Walter the Doubter, who had so often slumbered with his contemporaries, now slept with his fathers, and Wilhelmus Kieft governed in his stead.
_BOOK IV._ CONTAINING THE CHRONICLES OF THE REIGN OF WILLIAM THE TESTY.
CHAPTER I.
When the lofty Thucydides is about to enter upon his description of the plague that desolated Athens, one of his modern commentators assures the reader that the history is now going to be exceedingly solemn, serious and pathetic; and hints, with that air of chuckling gratulation with which a good dame draws forth a choice morsel from a cupboard to regale a favorite, that this plague will give his history a most agreeable variety.
In like manner did my heart leap within me when I came to the dolorous dilemma of Fort Good Hope, which I at once perceived to be the forerunner of a series of great events and entertaining disasters.

Such are the true subjects for the historic pen.

For what is history, in fact, but a kind of Newgate Calendar--a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-men?
It is a huge libel on human nature to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were building up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy, of our species.