The gifted Edmund Spenser, who charmed the world with his _Faery Queen_ died forsaken and in want. Milton sold his copyright of Paradise Lost for fifteen pounds, and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield was disposed of for a trifle to save him from the grip of the law. _Tempora mutantur!_ Third rate contributions by high class writers command their market value. If men can obtain payment for writing such articles as that of Professor Freeman’s criticism of _The Viking Age_ that appeared in the January number of the _Contemporary Review_ it shows that there is something in a name, that the conductors of such periodicals pay more regard to the reputation of the writer, than to the quality of the writing. Professor Freeman is no doubt a very able writer, but this is not the conclusion that would be reached in reading his captious and illogical criticism of M. du Chaillu’s book. I have evidently wounded the susceptibilities of some extreme churchman or irascible Celt, in the person of a reviewer in the _Literary World_, whose hostility is hardly explainable on the ground of mere difference of opinion. According to this disposer of events, I fall wofully short in the qualifications of one who is entitled to speak on the subject of archæology. I might, however, plead in extenuation, and in mitigation of punishment the reason given by Mr. Gladstone for upholding the verity of Old Testament Scripture, that “there is a very large portion of the community whose opportunities of judgment have been materially smaller than my own,” and that, “in all studies light may be thrown inwards from without.” I profess not to unravel the hidden mysteries of prehistoric antiquity, but simply to deal with the historical aspect of outside facts, though, as the _Saturday_ reviewer justly remarks, I must get into prehistory somewhere. Among the numerous disqualifications manifested in my treatise, I show “a very indifferent acquaintance” with “Language;” and its “twin sister, Ethnology,” of which, however, I may reasonably be presumed to know as much as my censor. Most persons who write on any subject do something to keep in touch with current facts and common knowledge. If the critic of the _Literary World_ had taken the trouble to read my book attentively, he would have found many references to what has been done by philologers and Ethnologists on whose labours he sets so much store. “As the book is in a second edition,” he condescends to inform us, he has “occupied more space than he should otherwise have done in estimating its claims to authority.” The conclusion he has reached is that I go as far astray in one direction as the Celticists do in another, an opinion which is quite within the limit of legitimate criticism. When, however, from his lofty tribune he looks down and imputes to me ignorance of what has been done by the great masters of “Language,” the Joneses, and Colebrookeses, and Bopps, and Potts, and