Excerpt from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 10 When I was reading for my degree at Oxford, I thought that the 'Politics' of Aristotle would be likely to interest me more than his 'Rhetoric, ' which was then usually taken into the Schools with the inevitable and sacramental 'Ethics.' Few people read it in those days, and my desire to take it up was treated rather as a harmless eccentricity, in the spirit of the words 'Tiens, tu aimes ton mari; c'est bizarre, pourtant ce n'est pas defendu.' This was in the year 1850, and I never returned to my old subject of study, after passing my examination, until, a few months ago, it occurred to me to read the book once again, and to see how it struck me after many years passed in politics and administration. When I turned my mind in that direction, I soon found that far from being neglected as it used to be, it had attracted a great deal of attention in the last six-and-forty years, and that many men of high ability had done their best to elucidate its teaching from many different points of view. The first who did so in England was, I think, Mr. Eaton of Merton, who became at a later period Professor of Moral Philosophy, and the author of the 'Permanence of Christianity.' 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.