can trace its use in Northumbria to the very times of S. Oswald, whilst every vestige has disappeared of the Runic records of an earlier period. Mercia received its Christianity from the Irish school of Lindisfarne, and we have runes on the coins of the first Christian kings, Peada and Œthelræd." But for the zealous labour of Archbishop Parker, in the sixteenth century, even few of the remaining Anglo-Saxon MSS. would have been preserved to the present day. John Bale, writing in 1549, says--"A great number of them that purchased the monasteries reserved the books of those libraries; some to scour their candlesticks, some to rub their boots, some they sold to grocers and soapsellers, some they sent over sea to the book-binders, not in small numbers, but at times whole ships full, to the wondering of foreign nations." Religious and political rancour has too often consigned to destruction the archives and monuments of hated rivals. Cardinal Ximines, somewhat earlier, committed to the flames an immense mass of valuable Arabic MSS. and, not long afterwards, Archbishop Zumarraga committed a similar act of insensate vandalism on the picture-written national archives of Mexico. Our mediæval historians, indeed, have themselves much to answer for in this direction. Strype says that Polydore Vergil, having, by licence from Henry VIII., when writing his history, procured many valuable books from various libraries in England, on its conclusion, piled "those same books together, and set them all on a light fire." Mr. Frederick Metcalf ("Englishman and Scandinavian") waxed wrath as he contemplated the irreparable loss sustained through the ignorance and fanaticism of our forefathers. He exclaims--"Cart loads of Old English mythical and heroic epics, finished histories in the vernacular, heaps of pieces teeming with sprightly humour, with vivid portraiture, with precious touches of nature, may or may not have been destroyed by the Danes, by the Normans, in their contempt for everything Anglo-Saxon, by insensate scribes in want of vellum--who scraped out things of beauty to make room for their own doting effusions, or pasted the leaves of MSS. together to make bindings--by the Reformers, by the Roundheads, by fire, by crass folly."