Buenos Ayres thirty-four degrees South, of the Line; while men well read, and well informed upon every other subject, have expressed surprise, that, after a residence of three years in the Capital of New Spain, I should not be intimately acquainted with the state of parties in Lima and Santiago, Bolivia and Bǒgǒtã.
Under these circumstance, I have conceived that it ought to be my object to combine as much information as possible in my present work, and thus to render it independent of those which have preceded it, by entering into details, a knowledge of which could not have been derived from other sources, without a perpetual, and harassing, reference to authorities, many of which are not within the reach of the public in general.
For instance, in addition to the Essai Politique of Baron Humboldt, to which I have expressed my obligations in another place, I have drawn largely from the Español; whose eloquent author, Mr. Blanco White, has embodied not only the most curious collection of State-papers now extant, with regard to the period, at which the tendency towards Independence first began to appear in the Spanish Colonies, but a mass of reflections upon American affairs, so moderate, so judicious, and so admirably adapted to the circumstances of the times, that, had his counsels been
