the sprightly French of a Froissart. Works of pure literature also—epics, lyrics, dramas, essays—because of the light that they often throw upon the times in which they were written, possess a large value of the same general character. Of nearly equal importance is the great class of materials which may be called documentary—laws, charters, formulæ, accounts, treaties, and official Written sources orders or instructions. These last are obviously of largest value in the study of social customs, land tenures, systems of government, the workings of courts, ecclesiastical organizations, and political agencies—in other words, of institutions—just as chronicles and histories are of greatest service in unraveling the narrative side of human affairs.

Of sources which are not in the form of writing, the most important are: (1) implements of warfare, agriculture, household economy, and the chase, large quantities of which have been brought to light in various parts of the world, and which bear witness to the manner of life prevailing among the peoples who produced and used them; (2) coins, hoarded up in treasuries or buried in tombs or ruins of one sort or another, Sources other than in writing frequently preserving likenesses of important sovereigns, with dates and other materials of use especially in fixing chronology; (3) works of art, surviving intact or with losses or changes inflicted by the ravages of weather and human abuse—the tombs of the Egyptians, the sculpture of the Greeks, the architecture of the Middle Ages, or the paintings of the Renaissance; (4) other constructions of a more practical character, particularly dwelling-houses, roads, bridges, aqueducts, walls, gates, fortresses, and ships,—some well preserved and surviving as they were first fashioned, others in ruins, and still others built over and more or less obscured by modern improvement or adaptation.

These are some of the things to which the writer of history must go for his facts and for his inspiration, and it is to these that the student, whose business is to learn and not to write, ought occasionally to resort to enliven and supplement what he finds in the books. As there are many kinds of sources, so there are many ways in which such materials may be utilized. If, for example, you are studying the life of the Greeks and in that connection pay a visit to a museum of fine arts and scrutinize Greek statuary, Greek vases, and Greek coins, you are very clearly using sources. If your subject is the church life of the later Middle Ages and you journey to Rheims or Amiens or Paris to contemplate the splendid cathedrals in these cities, with their spires Various ways of using sources and arches and ornamentation, you are, in every proper sense, using sources. You are doing the same thing if you make an observation trip to the Egyptian pyramids, or to the excavated Roman forum, or if you traverse the line of old Watling Street—nay, if you but visit Faneuil Hall, or tramp over the battlefield of Gettysburg. Many of these more purely "material" sources can be made use of only after long and sometimes arduous journeys, or through the valuable, but somewhat less satisfactory, medium of pictures and descriptions. Happily, however, the art of printing and the practice of accumulating enormous libraries have made possible the indefinite duplication of written sources, and consequently the use of them at almost any time and in almost any place. There is but one Sphinx, one Parthenon, one Sistine Chapel; there are not many Roman roads, feudal castles, or Gothic cathedrals; but scarcely a library in any civilized country is without a considerable number of the monumental documents of human history—the funeral oration of Pericles, the laws of Tiberius Gracchus, Magna Charta, the theses of Luther, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution of the United States—not to mention the all but limitless masses of histories, biographies, poems, letters, essays, memoirs, legal codes, and official records of every variety which are available for any one who seriously desires to make use of them.

But why should the younger student trouble himself, or be troubled, with any of these things? Might he not get all the history he can be expected to know from books written by scholars who have given their lives to exploring, organizing, and sifting just such sources? There can be no question that schools and colleges to-day have the use of better text-books in history than have ever before been available, and that truer notions of the subject in its various relations can be had from even the most narrow devotion to these texts than could be had from the study of their predecessors a generation ago. If the object of studying history were solely to acquire facts, it would, generally speaking, be a waste of time for high school or younger college students to wander far from text-books. But, assuming that history is studied not alone for the mastery of facts but also for the broadening of culture, and for certain kinds of mental training, the properly regulated use of sources by the student himself is to be justified on at least three grounds: (1) Sources The value of sources to the student help to an understanding of the point of view of the men, and the spirit of the age under consideration. The ability to dissociate one's self from his own surroundings and habits of thinking and to put himself in the company of Cæsar, of Frederick Barbarossa, or of Innocent III., as the occasion may require, is the hardest, but perhaps the most valuable, thing that the student of history can hope to get. (2) Sources add appreciably to the vividness and reality of history. However well-written the modern description of Charlemagne, for example, the student ought to find a somewhat different flavor in the account by the great Emperor's own friend and secretary, Einhard; and, similarly, Matthew Paris's picture of the raving and fuming of Frederick II. at his excommunication by Pope Gregory ought to bring the reader into a somewhat more intimate appreciation of the character of the proud German-Sicilian emperor. (3) The use of sources, in connection with the reading of secondary works, may be expected to train the student, to some extent at least, in methods of testing the accuracy of modern writers, especially when the subject in hand is one that lends itself to a variety of interpretations. In the sources the makers of history, or those who stood close to them, are allowed to speak for themselves, or for their times, and the study of such materials not only helps plant in the student's mind the conception of fairness and impartiality in judging historical characters, but also cultivates the habit of tracing things back to their origins and verifying what others have asserted about them. So far as practicable the student of history, from the age of fourteen and onwards, should be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely acquisitive.

In preparing a source book, such as the present one, the purpose is to further the study of the most profitable sources by removing some of the greater difficulties, particularly those of accessibility and language. Clearly impracticable as anything like historical "research" undoubtedly is for younger students, it is none the less believed that there are abundant first-hand materials in the range of history which such students will not only find profitable but actually enjoy, and that any Simplicity of many mediæval sources acquaintance with these things that may be acquired in earlier studies will be of inestimable advantage subsequently. It is furthermore believed, contrary to the assertions that one sometimes hears, that the history of the Middle Ages lends itself to this