oedera" a rich
accession of knowledge; but a foreigner could not sympathise with the
feelings, or even understand the language, of the domestic story of
our nation; our rolls and records, our state-letters, the journals of
parliament, and those of the privy-council; an abundant source of
private memoirs; and the hidden treasures in the state-paper office,
the Cottonian and Harleian libraries; all these, and much besides, the
sagacity of Carte contemplated. He had further been taught--by his own
examination of the true documents of history, which he found preserved
among the ancient families of France, who with a warm patriotic
spirit, worthy of imitation, "often carefully preserved in their
families the acts of their ancestors;" and the _tresor des chartes_
and the _depot pour les affaires etrangeres_ (the state-paper office
of France),--that the history of our country is interwoven with that
of its neighbours, as well as with that of our own countrymen.[78]

Carte, with these enlarged views, and firm with diligence which never
paused, was aware that such labours--both for the expense and
assistance they demand--exceeded the powers of a private individual;
but "what a single man cannot do," he said, "may be easily done by a
society, and the value of an opera subscription would be sufficient to
patronise a History of England." His valuable "History of the Duke of
Ormond" had sufficiently announced the sort of man who solicited this
necessary aid; nor was the moment unpropitious to his fondest hopes,
for a _Society for the Encouragement of Learning_ had been formed, and
this impulse of public spirit, however weak, had, it would seem,
roused into action some unexpected quarters. When Carte's project was
made known, a large subscription was raised to defray the expense of
transcripts, and afford a sufficient independence to the historian;
many of the nobility and the gentry subscribed ten or twenty guineas
annually, and several of the corporate bodies in the city honourably
appeared as the public patrons of the literature of their nation. He
had, perhaps, nearly a thousand a year subscribed, which he employed
on the History. Thus everything promised fair both for the history and
for the historian of our fatherland, and about this time he zealously
published another proposal for the erection of a public library in the
Mansion-house. "There is not," observed Carte, "a great city in Europe
so ill-provided with public libraries