When I remembered that I had to address the Society to-day I thought at first of choosing some subject remote from the troubles of the moment, something analogous to my former addresses on the development of historical studies in England. But it was not possible to do so. The events which are in progress now have too absorbing an interest to permit us to abstract ourselves from them, for which of us is not in some way or other intimately affected by them? Besides that, these events have for any historian not merely the interest which all of us share, but an interest of a very special kind. The historian sees in action before his eyes the abstractions he has been reading about in books all his life: the struggle of races, the conflict of opposing ideas, the operation of economic laws, the development of historical tendencies, and perceives what these phrases really mean when they are translated into facts. There has been no such open conflict of ideals since the wars of the French Revolution. There has been no such huge conflict of races since the time when the Teutonic peoples moved westward to overthrow Roman civilisation and plant their own in its place. One of Milton's similes for the Satanic host pictures their coming:

‘A multitude like which the populous North Poured never from her frozen loins to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons Came like a deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.’

As an isolated episode the Despenser war is of little interest and less importance, but taken as a characteristic expression of baronial opposition and royal policy as controlled by favourites, it assumes a position of considerable importance in the reign of Edward II. The events in Wales during the reign have a real and intimate connection with the great crises in the struggle between the King and his barons. This was to some extent inevitable. By crushing the last traces of independence in Wales, Edward I had removed a dangerous enemy of the English Crown. He failed to effect the corollary that such a fact involved. The marcher privileges remained undiminished, and the marcher energies which could no longer find employment in the struggle against the Welsh, sought a new direction in the fertile field of English politics. It was in the troubles that followed the divisions of the Gloucester inheritance among the co-heiresses that the real expression of baronial feeling in the marches was made, and the real strength of the baronial power realised. Questions of great constitutional importance were involved in the dispute. The present intention is to give merely the chronicle of events which led up to the outbreak and a summary of its immediate results.

Burgundy as a province was devoted to the League, but not in the most fanatical sense. The reasons for its Leaguer sympathies were numerous: its catholicity—the number of Huguenots, though recently proved to have been larger than at one time supposed, was always small as compared with south-west France—the proximity of the Lorraine influence, the nearness of Spain, and above all the souvenir of the fame of the province in the days of the Sovereign Dukes. The provinces in which the royal power had been most recently imposed were usually against the central government—either leaguer or protestant. Paris, no doubt, seems to contradict this view, but all capitals were more fervently Leaguer than the rest of their provinces, and Paris, as the most populous and unquiet city of France, was simply the arch-leaguer. The members of the parlement and the royal officials who were averse to the league early withdrew from Dijon, and Flavigny in the Auxois became the obvious place for a Royalist gathering. In fact, every other place of any size was, at that stage, Leaguer, and Flavigny had facilities for defence. The formal schism of all the judicial, administrative, and financial machinery followed, as elsewhere, on Henry III's edict from Tours, March 1589, which suspended the parlements from their functions.

I feel somewhat diffident in venturing to read a paper on the subject of the work of the great historian, on whose writings the President of the Royal Historical Society is the leading modern authority. His new edition of Macaulay's ‘History’ is a work that has been welcomed by all historical students, and the wealth of the illustrations corresponds with the richness of the style of which the historian was a past master. No one can study the ‘History’ without experiencing the pleasure of reading the graceful, flowing, well-balanced sentences, the pure English, the rhythm of each phrase, and of noting the graphic power of description and characterisation. It may be that the more exact historians of our own day, whose facts are supported by numerous references to authorities and documents, who never give the rein to their imaginations, take too little trouble to clothe their bare statements with suitable adornment, and cultivate a bald, tedious and cumbersome style depressing to the reader, might learn a lesson from the elder school of which Lord Macaulay was so bright an example.

An official account of the Indies states that in 1574 there were 200 Spanish settlements or towns (pueblos de Españoles) in Spanish America, some of them ranking as cities, others as villas (i.e. boroughs or towns); 100 of these were in South America. Here is an extract from the book:—

‘The city of Popayan is 22 leagues from the city of Cali, which bounds it on the North; and 20 leagues from Almaguer, which bounds it to the South. It has 30 Spanish householders (vecinos), of whom 16 are encomenderos. Its district contains 32 villages or divisions of Indians, with 9000 tributary Indians, divided into 19 repartimientos, 3 of them tributary to the king, the rest to individuals.’

The correspondence which forms the subject of this communication begins on April 25, 1561, with a letter from the Queen to Czar Ivan the Terrible, and ends in April 1603 with a letter from Czar Boris to Elizabeth. The frequent intercourse between England and Russia during this period has produced in forty-two years probably more than a hundred letters. Of these ninety-eight have been identified; others are mentioned which cannot be found, probably destroyed by accident in the course of the last three centuries. In any case the considerable amount of letters which we possess is deserving of notice. Some of them are simply short safe-conducts given by the Queen to Englishmen going to Russia, but these are few, the great mass of the correspondence consisting of long letters exchanged by the monarchs on important commercial and diplomatic subjects.

Nearly ninety years have passed away since J. J. Cony-beare prepared the first edition of the Old English poem of ‘Widsith,’ or ‘The Traveller's Song,’ for inclusion among his ‘Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,’ a work published in 1826. ‘Widsith’ is the oldest Germanic poem we have and its imprint excited immediate attention. The student of legend was attracted to it by the close connexion it shows with Germanic saga, and the historian timidly acknowledged the appeal it made to him to honour it as a genuine source of information. The characteristics of the poem have combined to place it in the forefront of that great mass of dubious documents which are found written in sundry western languages and which purport to deal with the story of the legendary heroes of Germanic race from the time of Constantius Chlorus to the middle of the sixth century.