"But all this information is unavailable in consequence of the regulations of the office in which the wills are kept. All the books of entry, both of ancient and modern wills, are kept together, and can only be consulted in the same department of the same office, in the same manner and subject to precisely the same restrictions and the same payments. No distinction is made between the fees to be paid by a literary person who wishes to make a few notes from wills, perhaps three or four hundred years old, in order to rectify a fact, a name, a date, or to establish the proper place of a descent in a pedigree, or the exact meaning of a doubtful word, and the fees to be paid by the person who wants a copy of a will proved yesterday as evidence of a right to property perhaps to be established in a court of justice. No extract is allowed to be made, not even of a word or a date, except the names of the executors and the date of the will. Printed statements in historical books, which refer to wills, may not be compared with the wills as entered; even ancient copies of wills handed down for many generations in the families of the testators, may not be examined in the registered wills without paying the office for making new and entire copies. "No such restrictions exclude literary inquirers from the British Museum, where there are papers equally valuable. The Public Record Offices are all open, either gratuitously or upon payment of easy fees. The Secretary of State for the Home Department grants permission of access to her Majesty's State Paper Office. Your Grace's predecessor gave the Camden Society free access to the registers of wills at Lambeth--documents exactly similar to those at Doctors' Commons. The Prerogative Office is, probably, the only public office in the kingdom which is shut against literary inquirers. "The results of such regulations are obvious. The ancient wills at Doctors' Commons not being accessible to those to whom alone they are useful, yield scarcely any fees to the office; historical inquirers are discouraged; errors remain uncorrected; statements of facts in historical works are obliged to be left uncertain and incomplete; the researches of the Camden Society and other similar societies are thwarted; and all historical inquirers regard the condition of the Prerogative Office as a great literary grievance. {216}