II.] TEN YEARS OF WORK. 31 assertions of success ; I may, if I am fortunate in my company, have to make some of them blush too. But what is that a*mong friends? and here I know none but friends. There may be some who have a vested interest in stupidity and false criticism, but I am thankful to say that I do not know even their names ; and all who take a real and genuine interest in my studies, whether I know them or not, I am proud to look upon as friends with whom I need practise no reticence or concealment. So with your good leave I will dismiss myself first. The thought that ten of the best years of a man's life have been given to work like this is a very serious one. What have I done ? How have I done it ? How far have I fulfilled my own hopes? How far have I realised the good wishes of my friends? How have I justified the good opinion of those who placed me where I am ? Perhaps it would be more modest if I left it to others to judge and to pass judgment. But I would rather try to report what I have tried to do, and how I have tried to do it, than leave it unsaid. No man is so fit to review a book as the author himself, because he both knows what he meant to say and will be the first to hear and feel what his kind friends the critics would make the world believe that he has said. In the first place, let me say that I have tried to fulfil the promise which I made in my inaugural lecture—' I desire to introduce myself to you not as a philosopher, not as a politician, but as a worker at history.' That I have worked at history is, I think, proved by the bulk of the results : for during the ten years I have completed ten volumes, and nearly an eleventh volume, of the English Historians published by the Master of the Rolls ; I have edited the whole of the third volume and assisted in the first and second volumes of the Councils of the English Church; I have published the volume of Select Charters, which has now