home, or even abroad, in public or in private, at all comparable to our own in historic importance, and none so intimately connected with our national credit, so there are none which have a stronger claim on the attention and liberality of the Government.

There must then be Official Calendars of the whole collection for office purposes, and no selection of documents will satisfy these requirements. If they can be made besides generally useful to the public, that is a gain, and that utility has been one object of the Master of the Rolls. As Keeper of these Records, as bound by the repeated recommendations of the House of Commons, calendars and inventories for the better use and safer custody of the Records under his charge were with Lord Romilly a primary obligation. Nor until such calendars have been completed is it easy to see how any satisfactory selection can be made. Supposing, what is hardly probable, that all who were interested in consulting these papers could agree upon a principle of selection, long before such a selection had approached its completion new papers would have turned up, additions and alterations would have had to be made, a new series would be required to supplement the first, whilst the varying tastes, pursuits, and requirements of many readers would have remained unsatisfied. Hardly any two judges would be found to agree why this document should be selected and that rejected. Nor indeed is it possible for the most skilful to lay down abstract rules as to the relative importance of any class. of historical papers. Their real importance cannot always be measured until they are viewed in their connection with others. Their true meaning and value are not patent at first sight, nor perhaps until subsequent researches have long after flashed an alien light upon them, and invested with an unexpected gravity what by itself seemed trivial and unimportant. In all researches of this kind no editor can be trusted to select for another. He

may methodise, index, and catalogue, leaving the inquirer to sift his materials and push his investigations further, if needful; but the task of selection each man must undertake for himself. With a thoughtful historian that selection will vary at every stage of his investigation-at every hour when fresh light dawns upon him. What at first filled him with rapture, he will upon maturer inquiry reject; what seemed insignificant at first sight, tedious and even repulsive, will often commend itself to his riper judgment; for of history it is true what Bacon said of physical causes: 'It cometh often to pass that mean and small things discover great, better than great can discover the small.' As to the other alternative of publishing all documents indiscriminately at full length, we prefer to quote the able remarks of Mr. Tytler, the Historian of Scotland:

would

To print all the records and muniments. require an enormous sum; so it comes to a choice or balance between having a correct knowledge of the contents of all the records and letters illustrating English history, and having a small corner of our history, perhaps extending to twenty or thirty years, illustrated by the Records themselves. No historians familiar with the use of original materials would hesitate, I think, to use the Catalogues. By them he would be enabled to collect all the scattered lights which might illustrate the general History of England from a large mass of original documents. In the other way he would acquire a minute knowledge of a very curtailed portion; but the lights thrown upon important points of history within this portion would be proportionably scanty. Besides this, it is evident that were the whole, or even the greater portion of the records to be printed, it would only be the substitution of an unfathomable sea of "print" for an unfathomable sea of "manuscript." In the end, to render such a mass available to the historian, catalogues and indexes, with a brief analysis of the

documents, would be found necessary. Thus, at last, you must have Catalogues raisonnés. Would it not be easier and far less expensive to have them at first? Again, when any serious difficulty or obscure point occurs, a historian, in his anxiety Hence he may in many

for truth, must inspect the original. instances dispense with printing the record or letter itself, but without the catalogue he remains ignorant of its existence. The advantages of first making catalogues are also great when viewed in connection with the plan of afterwards printing a selection of the records themselves. Being once acquainted with the whole mass of records, letters, State Papers, &c., in short, all the materials illustrating the civil, ecclesiastical, or constitutional history of the country, this selection will be made under the most favourable circumstances. The most valuable for the purpose of history will be chosen, and there will be the greatest chance of all being printed from originals. Lastly, the benefits resulting from this plan of forming catalogues will be most important in checking the progress of historical error.'"

These arguments appear to us unanswerable. But whilst there is one class of critics who set such an inordinate value on our public muniments that nothing will satisfy them short of printing all at full length, there is an opposite class who reject them all as equally unworthy of credit. They are possessed by a strange notion that of all historical evidences State Papers are the least trustworthy. It is the fixed creed of these objectors that statesmen and ambassadors indulged in a perpetual masquerade, and joined in a general combination to hide the truth, not only from the public-which might appear plausible-but from each other-which must appear absurd. Without, then, insisting on the fact that State Papers were secret papers, never intended for the public eye, and therefore not likely to offer any temptation or adReport of Select Committee, p. 715.

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vantage for disguise, what possible motive, it may be asked, could there be for a foreign ambassador in a foreign Court to pervert the facts which fell under his own observation? Why should the Spanish, the French, or the Venetian envoys residing in England transmit to their respective governments studious misrepresentations of what was passing around them? That would have been to neutralise the very purpose of their mission, and unquestionably have exposed them at once to disgrace and dismissal. Or, if such had been the practice of any one of them, can it be imagined that all were embarked in the same ridiculous plot? Did all combine in the same tale of misrepresentation, and were all their despatches written by consent in a sort of ambassadorial conclave? If not, the inconsistency displayed in their separate reports and despatches would certainly have betrayed them. It is hardly needful to expose seriously so transparent a sophism-so transparent indeed and so absurd, that it could never have been entertained for a moment by any one who possessed any real knowledge of the subject, or had taken the trouble to verify his suspicions. Ambassadors, like other men, have their national and individual prejudices. They are liable to be misled by those about them. They are exposed to the temptation of sending home their own views of the facts, and of selecting those facts which are most in accordance with their own prepossessions and their own interests. Statesmen have objects to be gained by diplomacy and statecraft, the free use of which they consider legitimate; and no one in reading their reports would accept them all implicitly as simple, unbiassed representations of the truth. But the same objection will apply to every kind of correspondence, oral or verbal. Dr. Johnson's conversation is no more to be received for a faithful representation of Whiggery than the journal of Whitelock or the Presbyterian Dr. Baillie is to be regarded as an accurate description of Charles I. and the

Cavaliers. The thoughts and the writings of politicians, like those of other men, are variously coloured by passion, by prejudice, by employment, by party, by the desire of success or the fear of discomfiture. Are they for this reason absolutely and entirely false? If the historian is to reject them on this ground he must equally reject all testimony; and all history, whether of his own or of any other time, becomes impossible. But the correspondence of statesmen is not more distorted by prejudice and falsehood than that of ordinary men, not even when engaged in some diplomatic intrigue they may have wished to deceive the outside world; for though they might hide their real intentions from others, they could have no object in deceiving their own agents and ambassadors. Outside the charmed circle the world is deluded and deceived, but once within it and all things appear in their true colours. This is the advantage of such publications as these Calendars. They take the reader behind the scenes; they lay bare before him the puppets and the real men, the phantasies and the facts, the true and ostensible motives. If there be deceit, they furnish him with the means of detecting it. They enable him to divide the false from the true. Moreover, they supply him with the cross lines of evidence; they furnish the means of comparing statement with statement, of confronting one witness with another. Testimony may be false, events in history may be perverted, mathematical accuracy is nowhere attainable; but society stands on no better testimony than this. Its contracts, its laws, its dealings, and its obligations rest on no surer foundation. Does any man question its sufficiency in the actual business of life? Then why should he doubt its sufficiency for the past?

So long indeed as the old and exclusive system prevailed, there was a tendency among historians, in their triumphant possession of a few diplomatic papers, to rear specious and