the galleries and Reading Room of the British Museum or the Houses of Parliament. The light and cheerful proportions, the polished floors, the oak and the mahogany of the French Foreign Archives, even the sombre ecclesiastical dignity of Simancas, find no place here. One thought, that of security, has absorbed all other considerations; and except the edifice were shelled by an invading army, or stormed in a civil insurrection, it is impossible to conceive what evil accident could ever befall it or its contents. Here, at all events, it may be supposed that, after escaping numerous perils of fire, water, and official neglect, the national records had found, like Æneas, a safe resting-place at last.

The collection is enormous. Into this vast receptacle the Law Courts, the Treasury, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Departments, have disgorged their voluminous contents. The public acts of this nation, from the Doomsday of William the Conqueror to the Coronation Oath of Queen Victoria, the pulsations of the great machine of government, with all its complex operations, are here chronicled and recorded in all their immense variety from day to day and from hour to hour. Here is to be traced the open and the secret history of the nation; its transactions at home and abroad; its most subtle and mysterious negotiations; the employment of its treasures; the number and disposition of its forces; the musters of its population; the distribution of its land, its forests, and its manors; the rise and progress of its nobility and great families; its proceedings in Parliament; its charters, its patents, its civil and criminal judicature. Whatever, in short, this kingdom has for eight centuries done or proposed to do by the complicated functions of its Government and Administration, restless as the sea and multitudinous as the sands upon its shore, is here committed to safe, silent, and impartial witnesses. Stored up in iron gratings, classified and arranged, preserved, as far

as human skill can preserve them, from innumerable perils, the public records of this kingdom now slumber in their new repository of stone and iron undisturbed, except when removed from their shelves to gratify the curiosity of the antiquarian or assist the researches of the historian.

With materials so vast, yet so important, two questions have perpetually arisen from early times: first, how are they to be most efficiently preserved ? and next, how turned to the best account? Happily the nation has suffered little from foreign invasions. Such misfortunes as have overtaken Strassburg, and destroyed its libraries and its manuscripts, are comparatively unknown here. Even in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, and in the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth, though the rage of party might dismantle or destroy mansions, monasteries, and cathedrals, it left uninjured the national muniments. Whether Romanist or Protestant, Cavalier or Roundhead, gained the ascendency, all alike in turn respected the archives of the kingdom, and preserved them from sacrilegious violence. Their worst enemies have been of an ignobler kind-rats and mice, fire, damp, and mildew: the negligence in some instances, the misplaced confidence in others, of those who were appointed to preserve them. Dispersed in various quarters of the metropolis, some at the Tower, some at Carlton Ride, some in the Chapter House at Westminster, others at the Rolls House; exposed to weather, dust, and smoke; stowed away in sacks, boxes, and hampers; unmanageable from their vastness and unwieldiness; little known, and therefore attracting little attention-successive Governments were contented to believe that these muniments were in some sense preserved, and equally contented that they should be of no use to any Careless and ignorant of their value so long as no inquiries were made, every obstacle was multiplied and all access was sedulously barred, whenever such access was de

one.

sired, except in the case of a few favoured inquirers. History in this country has always found devotees and admirers in one guise or another. Even from the time of the Reformation some few, chiefly among the clergy, have busied themselves with historical or biographical or topographical investigations. At no period, not even in the fanatical ascendency of the gloomiest Puritanism, have the people of England been wholly indifferent to their national antiquities. The love of the past, the appeal to precedent, feudal castles and monastic ruins, parochial and cathedral churches, the visible memorials of former greatness, taste, genius, and faith, have helped to foster this historical spirit. Then, again, the general stability of our English aristocracy and gentry, undisturbed by violent political convulsions, rooted mainly on the same soil, and surrounded for ages by the same tenantry, has handed down the historical traditions of great families from generation to generation, and associated them with the sympathies of the living. We need not the statues of the Howards, the Stanleys, and the Cecils; we have their breathing representatives amongst us.

To those who fostered and gratified these national tastes and inclinations, generally at their own cost, and rarely with any expectation of remuneration, a liberal use of the national archives would have been a great boon; as, in truth, the freest access to these papers ought to be considered the best justification for the cost bestowed upon their preservation. But their appointed guardians, whose official emoluments depended for the most part on fees levied from inquirers, were not forward in promoting the wishes of antiquarians, nor were Ministers of State much inclined to listen to the applications of students. For any but historical and archæological purposes, nine-tenths of these papers had long ceased to be of any importance. Modern diplomacy was not liable to be compromised by the revelation of any secrets they con

tained. All the precautions that prudence required might have been easily secured by laying a prohibition upon such papers only as referred to events subsequent to the Peace of Versailles. But the formalities of office would admit of no such commonplace distinctions. A mysterious belief prevailed that Secretaries of State drank wisdom and inspiration from the despatches of Cardinal Wolsey, or solved the Gordian knot of policy by profound studies of the diplomatic correspondence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Who could tell whether, in the debates of the House of Commons, ministerial policy might not be assailed, or some question asked, which could not be conveniently parried without a reference to the State papers of the Tudors or the Stuarts? So those who would have turned these papers to the best account were jealously excluded from the use of them. And even when the rule was relaxed by Secretaries of State, like Lord Russell, combining literary taste with statesmanship, when a more liberal spirit was willing to make a partial concession to historians and biographers, the necessity was imposed upon the applicant of strictly defining the nature of his inquiry, the class of papers he proposed to examine, and the exact limits of his search. The interpretation of these conditions was left to the discretion of the keepers or the clerks of the office. It was at their option to produce or keep back whatever documents they pleased, and the inquirer had no remedy. Official catalogues, in many instances, did not exist; in no instance could they be consulted. The system of arrangement varied with the office: not uncommonly in the same office under different keepers. What could an inquirer do, hampered as he was by these restrictions? He might complain; but he had no means of substantiating his complaints. He might suspect; but his suspicions necessarily recoiled upon himself. In defence of a policy so vexatious and so frivolous, nothing could be urged

except the old immemorial argument of tyrannical custom. And as, whenever any modification or reform was proposed, they alone were consulted who were most concerned in maintaining abuses, these restrictions bade fair to continue immovable, like the laws of the Medes and Persians. How they were swept away, and a wiser and more gracious system introduced, we shall have to tell hereafter.

But in spite of all these precautions for excluding the public, it was discovered that the great purpose, on which that exclusion was founded, had not been secured. Idle and ignorant curiosity, exposure to the avarice of collectors, the thumbs and fingers of careless readers, may inflict injury and loss on valuable books and papers; but public indifference has always been incomparably more prejudicial. Keepers of libraries and museums grow careless of treasures nobody cares to inspect, and no one inquires after. The true worth of these things is in the eyes and ears of the public, and no precaution is so effectual, no supervision so sure or so searching, as publicity. Statesmen in general are too much absorbed in the pressing duties of the day to trouble themselves with the griefs of scholars or the cares of historians. Yet occasionally they have been compelled to rouse themselves from their apathy. As late as the year 1836 a select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed, on the motion of Mr. Charles Buller, to inquire into the present. state of the Records of the United Kingdom.' The result of their labours is preserved in a portly Blue-book extending to 946 pages. Among the witnesses examined on that occasion was Mr. Henry Cole, and this is the description he then gave of the condition of one class of the public muniments, under the old system of exclusion: Some (he says) were in a state of inseparable adhesion to the stone walls; there were numerous fragments which had only just escaped entire consumption by vermin, and many were in the last stage of