Excerpt: "It would much conduce to the magnanimity and honor of man, if a collection were made of the extraordinaries of Human Nature, principally out of the reports of history--that is, what is the last and highest pitch to which man's nature, of itself, hath ever reached, in all the perfection of the mind and body..."
Samuel Griswold Goodrich (August 19, 1793 – May 9, 1860) was an American author, better known under the pseudonym Peter Parley. (Wikipedia)