"To proceed, therefore, with our supposed student's course of reading. Keeping the general history which he has been reading as his text, and getting from it the skeleton, in a manner, of the future figure, he must now break forth excursively to the right and left, collecting richness and fulness of knowledge from the most various sources. For example, we will suppose that where his popular historian has mentioned that an alliance was concluded between two powers, or a treaty of peace agreed upon, he first of all resolves to consult the actual documents themselves, as they are to be found in some one of the great collections of European treaties, or, if they are connected with English history, in Rymer's Fœdera. By comparing the actual treaty with his historian's report of its provisions, we get, in the first place, a critical process of some value, inasmuch as the historian's accuracy is at once tested: but there are other purposes answered besides. An historian's report of a treaty is almost always an abridgement of it; minor articles will probably be omitted, and the rest condensed, and stripped of all their formal language. But our object now being to reproduce to ourselves so far as it is possible, the very life of the period which we are studying, minute particulars help us to do this; nay, the very formal enumeration of titles, and the specification of towns and districts in their legal style, help to realize the time to us, if it be only from their very particularity. Every common history records the substance of the treaty of Troyes, May 1420, by which the succession to the crown of France was given to Henry V. But the treaty in itself, or the English version of it which Henry sent over to England to be proclaimed there, gives a far more lively impression of the triumphant state of the great conqueror, and the utter weakness of the poor French king, Charles VI., in the ostentatious care taken to provide for the recognition of his formal title during his lifetime, while all real power is ceded to Henry, and provision is made for the perpetual union hereafter of the two kingdoms under his sole government.

"I have named treaties as the first class of official instruments to be consulted, because the mention of them occurs unavoidably in every history. Another class of documents, certainly of no less importance, yet much less frequently referred to by popular historians, consists of statutes, ordinances, proclamations, acts, or by whatever various names the laws of each particular period happen to be designated. That the Statute Book has not been more habitually referred to by writers on English history, has always seemed to me a matter of surprise. Legislation has not perhaps been so busy in every country as it has been with us; yet every where, and in every period, it has done something. Evils, real or supposed, have always existed, which the supreme power in the nation has endeavoured to remove by the provisions of law. And under the name of laws I would include the acts of councils, which form an important part of the history of European nations during many centuries; provincial councils, as you are aware, having been held very frequently, and their enactments relating to local and particular evils, so that they illustrate history in a very lively manner. Now, in these and all the other laws of any given period, we find in the first place, from their particularity, a great additional help towards becoming familiar with the times in which they were passed; we learn the names of various officers, courts, and processes; and these, when understood, (and I suppose always the habit of reading nothing without taking pains to understand it,) help us, from their very number, to realize the state of things then existing; a lively notion of any object depending on our clearly seeing some of its parts, and the more we people it, so to speak, with distinct images, the more it comes to resemble the crowded world around us. But in addition to this benefit, which I am disposed to rate in itself very highly, every thing of the nature of law has a peculiar interest and value, because it is the expression of the deliberate mind of the supreme government of society; and as history, as commonly written, records so much of the passionate and unreflecting part of human nature, we are bound in fairness to acquaint ourselves with its calmer and better part also."

"Enough has been said, I think, to show that history contains no mean treasures; that, as being the biography of a nation, it partakes of the richness and variety of those elements which make up a nation's life. Whatever there is of greatness in the final cause of all human thought and action, God's glory and man's perfection, that is the measure of the greatness of history. Whatever there is of variety and intense interest in human nature, in its elevation, whether proud as by nature, or sanctified as by God's grace; in its suffering, whether blessed or unblessed, a martyrdom or a judgment; in its strange reverses, in its varied adventures, in its yet more varied powers, its courage and its patience, its genius and its wisdom, its justice and its love, that also is the measure of the interest and variety of history. The treasures indeed are ample, but we may more reasonably fear whether we may have