In one sense biographies and autobiographies are certainly among the most valuable materials for the historian. Biography, as Heinrich Simon, not Henri Simon, said, is the best kind of history, and the life of one man, if laid open before us with all he thought and all he did, gives us a better insight into the history of his time than any general account of it can possibly do. Now it is quite true that the life of a quiet scholar has little to do with history, except it may be the history of his own branch of study, which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems all-important. This is as it ought to be, till the universal historian finds the right perspective, and assigns to each branch of study and activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind towards its ideals. Even a quiet scholar, if he keeps his eyes open, may now and then see something that is of importance to the historian. While I was living in small rooms at Leipzig, or lodging _au cinquième_ in the Rue Royale at Paris, or copying manuscripts in a dark room of the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, I now and then caught glimpses of the mighty stream of history as it was rushing by. At Leipzig I saw much of Robert Blum who was afterwards _fusillé_ at Vienna by Windischgrätz in defiance of all international law, for he was a member of the German Diet, then sitting at Frankfurt. From my windows at Paris I looked over the _Boulevard de la Madeleine_, and down on the right to the _Chambre des Députés_, and I saw from my windows the throne of Louis Philippe carried along by its four legs by four women on horseback, with Phrygian caps and red scarfs, and I saw the next morning from the same windows the stretchers carrying the dead and wounded from the Boulevards to a hospital at the back of my street. In my small study at the East India House I saw several of the Directors, Colonel Sykes and others, and heard them discussing the fate of the East India Company and of the vast empire of India too, and at the same time the private interests of those who hoped to be Members of the new India Council, and those who despaired of that distinction. I was the first to bring the news of the French Revolution in February to London, and presented a bullet that had smashed the windows of my room at Paris, to Bunsen, who took it in the evening to Lord Palmerston. After I had seen the Revolution in Paris and the flight of the King and the Duchesse d’Orléans, I was in time to see in London the Chartist Deputation to Parliament, and the assembled police in Trafalgar Square, when Louis Napoleon served as a Special Constable, and I heard the Duke of Wellington explain to Bunsen, that though no soldier was seen in the streets there was artillery hidden under the bridges, and ready to act if wanted. I could add more, but I must not anticipate, and after all, to me all these great events seemed but small compared with a new manuscript of