Excerpt from The Kings and Queens of England: With Other Poems I must claim the indulgence of my friends for the many defects they will find in my poems, which they will please wink at, remembering that I was sixty years old when I commenced rhyming; and this by way of experiment, while on a visit to my daughter, in Brooklyn. My first essay, was The Monarchs of England. I took it up for my amusement, wishing to ascertain how much of that history I could recollect without help from any other source than memory. The rhyme is in many places far from smooth, and there are many redundances that might with advantage be lopped off; and were it to come under the critic's eye to be reviewed, I should feel it quite necessary to improve it, (the poetry, I mean.) But as it would require quite too much exertion for my eyes in their present state, and as the history, dates, &c., I believe, are correct, I send it to the press "with all its imperfections on its head." 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.