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Excerpt from Vacant Thrones: A Volume of Political Portraits I admit that some reason or excuse is necessary to justify the publication of the following series of personal sketches. Let the one or the other be found in an experience of my own: that in reading history or biography I have Often wished that the authors of these important works had been at more pains to give some intimacy as well as publicity to the characters with whom they were dealing, in order that the reader might recon struct for himself an individual conception of the personages whose lives or policies or achievements were, for the moment, under consideration. Such detaifs are Of quite subsidiary importance to the scholar or the student; but to me, and to other readers in our own libraries, they give light to the eyes, movement to the hands, and direction to the character of the man or woman whose physical and moral outlines we are anxious to recapture. 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.