The Eve of the Revolution; a chronicle of the breach with England

To give the quality and texture of the state of mind and feeling of an individual or class, to create for the reader the illusion of the intellectual atmosphere of past times. I have as a matter of course introduced many quotations but I have also ventured to resort frequently to the literary device (this, I know, gives the whole thing away) of telling the story by means of a rather free paraphrase of what some imagined spectator or participant might have thought or said about the matter in hand.