as the motto of his 'Commentaries.'
Veni! vidi! vici! sums up in brief the substance of what they contain.
It was always Rome's way! Rome swept a sponge that was soaked in blood
over all the past of the nations she subdued. She came to obliterate,
never to preserve. Her chroniclers disdained to ask how these or those
doughty antagonists had grown formidable, how their national life had
developed; whether their progress had been arrested by the conquerors or
whether they had become weak and enervated by social deterioration or
moral corruption. Enough that they were _Barbarians_.

The science of history can be but little advanced by writers such as
these, who pass from battlefield to battlefield--

'Crimson-footed, like the stork,
Through great ruts of slaughter,'

and to whom the silent growth of institutions and the evolution of
ethical sentiments and the development of the arts of peace were matters
which never presented themselves as worthy of their attention. You may
call this history if you will, in truth it is little better than
Empiricism. The world is a larger world than Rome or Athens dreamt of,
and students of history are beginning to realize that not quite the last
thing they have to do is 'to look at _home_.' Such a work as the
'Chronica Majora' of Matthew Paris is a national heritage which it is
shameful to allow much longer to be known only by the curious and
erudite. Now that there is no excuse for our neglect, is it too much to
hope that the day may not be far distant when the name of this great
Englishman may become as familiar to schoolboys as that of Sallust or
Livy, of Cornelius Nepos or Caesar--his name as familiar, and his
writings better known and more loved?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lord Langdale resigned three weeks before his death.

[2] The proposal to print and publish the _Calendars_ had been approved
by authority of the new Record Commissioners as early as January 1840.
_See_ preface to Mr. Lemons' 'Calendar' (Domestic, 1547-1580), p. viii.

[3] In Luard's sixth volume there are two facsimiles of certain coloured
drawings of the more precious gems at St. Alban's, with careful
descriptions of them, these and the illustrations being most probably
_executed by Mathew Paris himself_.

Art. II. 1.--_The Christian Brothers, their Origin and Work, with a
sketch of the Life of their Founder, The Venerable Jean Baptiste de la
Salle._ By Mrs. R. F. Wilson, London, 1883.

2. _La Premi