fine seals attached to them, of six or seven hundred years ago, and preserved in little round or oblong boxes of thin oak, to which the original covering of black leather still clung in shreds and tatters. Curiosity, and the rather wild hope of hitting upon autographs of Cromwell or Shakespeare, led me to examine these documents, and by the end of my second year at Eton I had unconsciously learnt to read them. After that time, my holidays were spent away from Renishaw, but before I went to Oxford I had occasional opportunities of following up the search amongst the numerous boxes of old manuscripts in the muniment room and elsewhere in the house, and thought myself rewarded by finding at one time impressions of the great seals of Elizabeth and James, an original grant of arms, or a letter-book of Charles the Second’s time; at another, King Richard’s charter to the Guild of Eckington, a “protection” from General Lord Fairfax, a household book begun in the year of the great plague, and a packet, sealed up two hundred years ago and never opened since, which proved to contain papers relating to fines, decimation, and sequestration under the Commonwealth. Still more interesting were the old letters written by various members of the family, and these I put carefully on one side, having already formed the idea of publishing a selection from them. In 1880, the year before I came of age, I commenced to write them out for the press in my leisure hours, and nine years later the work of printing my first volume was begun.