bined, totals which
appear insignificant by the side of the huge mass of historical
documents which existed at the time. Besides, it was not, in general,
with any purpose of making them generally accessible that collectors
like Peiresc, Gaignieres, Clairambault, Colbert, and many others,
withdrew from circulation documents which were in danger of being lost;
they were content (and it was creditable to do as much as this) to share
them, more or less freely, with their friends. But collectors (and their
heirs) are fickle people, and sometimes eccentric in their notions.
Certainly it is better that documents should be preserved in private
collections, than that they should be entirely unprotected and
absolutely inaccessible to the scientific worker; but in order that
Heuristic should be made really easier, the first condition is that all
collections of documents should be _public_.[27]

Now the finest private collections of documents--libraries and museums
combined--were naturally, in the Europe of the Renaissance, those
possessed by kings. And while other private collections were often
dispersed upon the death of their founders, these, on the contrary,
never ceased to grow; they were enriched, indeed, by the wreckage of all
the others. The _Cabinet des manuscrits de France_, for example, formed
by the French kings, and by them thrown open to the public, had, at the
end of the eighteenth century, absorbed the best part of the collections
which had been the personal work of the amateurs and scholars of the two
preceding centuries.[28] Similarly in other countries. The concentration
of a great number of historical documents in vast public (or
semi-public) establishments was the fortunate result of this spontaneous
evolution.

The arbitrary proceedings of the Revolution were still more favourable,
and still more effective in securing the amelioration of the material
conditions of historical research. The Revolution of 1789 in France,
analogous movements in other countries, led to the violent confiscation,
for the profit of the state (that is, of everybody), of a host of
private archives and collections--the archives, libraries, and museums
of the crown, the archives and libraries of monasteries and suppressed
corporations, and so on. In France, in 1790, the Constituent Assembly
thus placed the state in possession of a great number of depositories of
historical documents, previously scattered, and guarded more or less
jealou