the screen; when he appears in human body, he makes lapses, trips and stumbles, and lays himself bare to stings,” &c. This is in Professor Freeman’s early days, but men carry their idiosyncrasies into their riper years. It gives us an insight into this critic’s mind according to the estimation in which he was then held by his fellow-scribblers. To the article in question, which occupies nearly two columns of _The Antiquary_, the editor appends the following note:--“The story of Hengist and Horsa (including the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion) is an exploded fable. The Anglo-Saxons of England, like the Picts or Caledonians of Scotland, were only the earlier Northmen or Scandinavians.” This is pre-eminently an age of platitudes and Professor Freeman is great in such. “There is,” he says, “an English folk, and there is a British Crown.” There is also, it might be affirmed, a Scotch folk, and a British Crown, and until Mr. Gladstone shall accomplish his visionary project of Irish Home Rule, there is, and will be an Irish folk and a British Crown. “But the homes of the English folk,” we are to note, “and the dominions of the British Crown do not always mean the same thing.” Does any one suppose they do? “Here by the border stream of the Angle and the Saxon” we are in “the dominions of the British Crown,” &c. If by the “border stream” be meant the Tweed, it is more than doubtful if the Angles and Saxons ever saw that stream. In Professor Freeman’s “youth,” the “Anglo-Saxon race was unheard of,” and by some strange delusion, for which it is difficult to account, the “British race” dates, he believes, from some speech delivered a week before the time at which he writes. It is evident Professor Freeman has not been a reader of _Good Words_, at least of its early numbers published more than thirty years ago. In one of these he will find “The British race has been called Anglo-Saxon,” &c., and a good deal more which it might be inconvenient for him to learn. Professor Freeman “shows how some writers, sometimes more famous writers, now and then get at their facts.” “One received way,” he tells us, “is to glance at a page of an original writer, to have the eye caught by a word, to write down another word, that looks a little like it, and to invent facts that suit the words written down. To roll two independent words into a compound word with a hyphen is perhaps a little stronger; but only a little.” Are we to suppose that Professor Freeman is recounting his individual experience in dealing with the facts of English history?