he phenomena he must endeavour to
describe, he has not the privilege of writing badly. But he ought
_always_ to write well, and not to bedizen his prose with extra finery
once a week."

Of course much that is said in this book has been said before, but I do
not know any book wherein the student of history will find such an
organised collection of practical and helpful instructions. There are
several points on which one is unable to find oneself in agreement with
MM. Langlois and Seignobos, but these occur mainly where they are
dealing with theory; as far as practical work goes, one finds oneself in
almost perfect concurrence with them. That they know little of the way
in which history is taught and studied in England or Canada or the
United States is not at all an hindrance to the use of their book. The
student may enjoy the pleasure of making his own examples out of English
books to the rules they lay down. He may compare their cautions against
false reasoning and instances of fallacy with those set forth in that
excellent and concise essay of Bentham's, which is apparently unknown to
them. He will not fail to see that we in England have much to learn in
this subject of history from the French. The French archives are not so
fine as ours, but they take care to preserve their local and provincial
documents, as well as their national and central records; they give
their archivists a regular training, they calendar and make accessible
all that time and fate have spared of pre-revolutionary documents. We
have not got farther than the provision of a fine central Record Office
furnished with very inadequate means for calendaring the masses of
documents already stored and monthly accumulating there, though we have
lately set up at Oxford, Cambridge, and London the regular courses of
palaeography, diplomatic, and bibliography, that constitute the
preliminary training of the archivist or historical researcher. We want
more: we must have county archives, kept by trained archivists. We must
have more trained archivists at the disposal of the Deputy Keeper of the
Rolls, we must have such means as the _Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des
Chartes_ for full reports of special and minute investigations and
discoveries, for hand-lists and the like, before we can be considered as
doing as much for history as the heavily taxed French nation does
cheerfully, and with a sound confidence that the money it spends wisely
in science is in the truest s