Two years ago, I had the honour to attempt, in addressing you, to answer the question how far Thucydides was of value to the modern statesman. I have recently been re-reading Herodotus, not precisely with a view to answer the same question in reference to him, but still not without keeping it, to some extent, before my mind. I purpose accordingly, this afternoon, to lay before you some of the considerations which have occurred to me with regard to his famous Enquiries; for ‘Enquiries’ or ‘Researches’, rather than Histories, ought perhaps to be the English rendering of the title of his famous book.

It has been said with perhaps too much truth—Earth plays the step-dame to her poets ever, Then grieves and gives them fame, As if they cared to hear by God's great river The echo of their name.

Mr. Frederic Harrison, V.P.R.Hist. S., said:

It is now just one hundred years ago that, in a remote village church under Ashdown Forest in Sussex, and in the most simple manner, were laid to rest, by the loving care of his lifelongfriend, the mortal remains of the most famous writer of history in the English language. Edward Gibbon, the immortal author of ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, died in London in January 1794, at the age of 56, after an illness of a few days, almost in the fulnessof his intellectual power, at the zenith of his fame, with the great work of his life achieved, in perfect peace of mind, and surrounded by the esteem and affection of all who knew him. Hisdear friend, we may almost say his brother by adoption, Lord Sheffield, whose grandson to-day presides over this gathering, placed the body in the Sheffield mausoleum in Fletching Church, where it still reposes; and he collected in the house of Sheffield Place portraits, miniatures, personal relics, manuscripts, diaries, and letters of the historian; and there, until now, they have been religiously preserved as heirlooms in the Sheffield family. Nor have the literary remains ever been examined since the publication of Lord Sheffield's five volumes of ‘Miscellaneous Works’ in 1814, except partially by Dean Milman more than fifty years ago.

Of late years the attention of the most distinguished English and foreign economic writers has been riveted upon that remarkably sudden expansion of English trade and commerce which took place during the first half of the fourteenth century.

The problem is, How did the insignificant peddling English traders of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries so suddenly develop into the important political plutocracy of the fourteenth, a plutocracy so powerful that at one time it threatened to furnish the English constitution with a fourth estate, that of the merchants?

The purpose of this paper is not to discuss in detail the trade relations of England in the fifteenth century with other nations of Europe, but to endeavour to arrive at some conclusion as to the political and social standing of alien merchants in this country during the century by a consideration of the chief measures adopted to regulate their dealings. The insight which this consideration will give us into the nature and motives of the attitude then generally held by Englishmen towards these merchants will assist us greatly in arriving at some definite acquaintance with the economic theories of the period.

Last year it was my duty to lay before the Society the laws of the Lichfield Gild Merchant, which were of special interest from the lateness of the period from which they dated. Today I have the good fortune to be able to introduce to the notice of members a roll of the Shrewsbury Gild Merchant, which is of exceptional interest from its early date. It has been transcribed with great care by Mr. C. H. Drinkwater, Vicar of St. George's, Shrewsbury, who has already printed several similar rolls in the ‘Salop Archæological Transactions.’ He will shortly contribute to the ‘Transactions’ of that society a paper which comments in detail on the proper names, place names, and designations in the rolls. Into these points I shall not enter to-day, as I merely desire to call attention to the bearing of the document on a problem of very wide interest; I shall not attempt to elucidate its details.

English exploration in the age of Elizabeth is one of the main lines of national progress. It is no longer a by-path of our history, it is more and more plainly connected with that essential development of English life on which our Empire depended and depends. For it was in the latter half of the sixteenth century that the New World in East and West, by sea and land, was fully revealed to our countrymen, as it had been disclosed to Italians, Frenchmen, and Spaniards in the earlier years of the same century; the excitement, the hopes and fears, the boundless expectations, the astonishing achievements which had gone to inspire the heroic age of the countrymen of Columbus and Cortes, of Da Gama and Magellan—were all realised over again by the islanders of the Protestant North. Under Elizabeth our forefathers entered into the fulness of the national renaissance—for which they had been slowly educated since the Tudor dynasty began.

It is the special boast and glory of the English currency that for more than a thousand years it has maintained its original weight and purity in a far higher degree than any of its neighbours. In the whole course of our history only one severe shock has been given to the credit of the English coinage, the one with which this paper deals. Save in this one single case, the currency has been spared by even the worst, the weakest, and the most unfortunate of our rulers. In the clash of the Norman Conquest, in the evil days of King John, in the long thriftless administration of Henry III., in the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses, in the sharpest stress of the Great Rebellion, no ruler of England ever laid hands on the coin of the realm to alloy its purity or cut down its size. It is true that in the attrition of the ages the first of English coins, the venerable silver penny, has sunk to about one-third of its original weight. Offa, its first creator, struck it to the standard of 22 grains; Queen Victoria's Maundy penny of to-day weighs 7¼ grains. But this shrinkage has been due not to deliberate dishonesty in any series of kings or ministers, but to the variations of the ratio between gold and silver in the last five centuries, since the day when Edward III. first added gold money to the currency of the realm.

The particular phenomena of the crisis of 1621 in England have been examined in another connection' by the aid afforded in the State Papers, Domestic and Foreign, at the Record Office. That the movement—one, namely, of an unprecedented change in the relative values of the precious metals towards the close of the sixteenth century, bringing with it disturbance in the monetary standards and economic and social life of the chief States of Europe—was not restricted to England is demonstrable, and might safely be presumed. In the case of those other States, however, the nature of the evidence available differs from that revealed in such welcome fulness by the English State Papers. For Holland the chief authority is the huge Plakkaat book, a collection which takes the place of our Statutes of the Realm plus (our one great desideratum yet) a book of proclamations of the King in Council. In the case of Germany the want of a central rule rendered impossible anything like a statute or an imperial proclamation of sufficient authority to bind the various constituent parts of the empire. To face the monetary evils which beset her to even a greater and more pernicious degree than they did England, Germany was reduced to the less effectual system of local mint unions between the circles or contiguous princes.

For the last three years I have been hoping to take a convenient opportunity to put on record some corrections and additions which I am able to make to my introduction to Miss Lamond's edition of ‘Walter of Henley.’ The occasion has come in the saddest of all fashions, since I cannot delay longer the expression of my personal obligations to a French scholar who has recently died. The kindness I received from André RéVille adds poignancy to my own regret, although all English students must bitterly deplore the loss which historical research has sustained in the death of a man of such brilliant natural gifts, who had profited so well by the great opportunities of training which Paris now affords. He was especially interested in English history, and the first-fruits of his labours, in his paper on the ‘Abjuratio Regni’ (‘Revue Historique,’ L. 1–42), serve to show how much we might have hoped to learn from him, had his life been pro-longed.

L upold VON Wedel, author of the account of a journey through England and Scotland, 1584–1585, belonged to a noble German family, who still possess large estates in the North of Germany and in Scandinavia. He was born on the 25th of January in the year 1544, at Kremzow in Pomerania. Being a younger son, it was the intention of his family to prepare him for a learned career, and consequently after his father's death he entered the Latin School at Stargard, Pomerania. The lad, however (for he was only about eight years old), showed no intention of spending a quiet, studious life either at home or at school, his wish being to see foreign countries; and it is to this passionate desire that we owe the production of this very interesting journal of travels, military expeditions,&C., which he gives us in his own words.