Excerpt from Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1625-1678): Her Family and FriendsIf, in spite of an effort to the contrary, I have obtruded too prominently upon the reader's attention this, the local, or Essex, side of my subject, I must plead in extenuation the claims of my native county.' In quoting from letters and diaries of the seventeenth century, I have, except in a few places where the spelling seemed too quaint or picturesque to lose, modernised both spelling and punctuation. Without this, I fear the meaning of many sentences would have been, to ordinary readers, very obscure, and the names of numerous persons and places unidentifiable. The dates in the margins are intended, mainly, to render possible a reference to the original manuscripts cited.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.