cause that each loves best from every taint of falsehood, every inclination to calumny or concealment. I confess that it is towards this consummation that my dearest wishes as a student of History are directed ; and that I anticipate with the greatest pleasure the prospect of being instrumental and able to assist in the founding of an historical school in England, which shall join with the other workers of Europe in a common task; which shall build, not upon Hallam and Palgrave and Kemble and Froude and Macaulay, but on the abundant collected and arranged materials on which those writers tried to build whilst they were scanty and scattered and in disorder. The time cannot be far off when all the records of the medieval world which are in existence will be in print either in full or in such abundant abstracts as will be thoroughly trustworthy representations of their contents ; when every great Library will contain copies of them all, and when every town will contain a great Library. The seed sown by the old Record Commission, by presenting copies of their publications to the municipal corporations and principal provincial libraries, marks an era, as antiquaries well know, in the development of antiquarian study and the preservation of archaeological treasures. We may hope to see the same principle extended now, and although the chief labours of the historian must continue to find their place in his own study, as no library can supersede the need of books at home, still no man may be obliged to keep all his ideas in chronic effervescence and all his hopeful discoveries in a state of tantalising suspension, in the hope that once a year he can visit the Bodleian or the British Museum. For that day of many students, many books, many libraries, and many readers, I look with confidence ; in the meantime I do hope and trust that my work here, although this may not be its primary aim or its most successful use, may help in a humble way to educate workers for the good time coming.