danger of converting our knowledge either of past or present society into a collection of anecdotes, there is also a danger of regarding society as governed by external forces, and not by forces evolved out of itself. The statesman of the present wants perpetually to be reminded that he has to deal with actual men and women. Unless he sympathises with them and with their ideas, he will never be able to help them, and in like manner a historian who regards the laws of human progress in the same way that he would regard the laws of mechanics, misses, in my opinion, the highest inspiration for his work. Unless the historian can feel an affectionate as well as an intelligent interest in the personages with whom he deals, he will hardly discover the key to the movements of the society of which they formed a part. The statesman, too, will be none the worse if, in studying the past, he is reminded that his predecessors had to deal with actual men and women in their complex nature, and if thereby he learns that pity for the human race which was the inspiring thought of the New Atlantis, and which is the source of all true and noble effort.

That my own work falls far short of the ideal which I have set before myself, none of my readers can be so conscious as I am myself. Whatever it may be worth, it is the best that I have to offer.

SOUTH VIEW,

BROMLEY, KENT.

SAMUEL R. GARDINER,