The historian has a yet wider field for labour, and a busier work to do, to connect into one chain the links that lie scattered far and wide, among deserted thoroughfares, decaying mansion houses, desecrated churches, and monastic ruins; to gather up the broken fragments of political records, enshrined in many a mouldering parchment, crumbling stone, or withered tree; and to weave into a whole the threads of tradition and legendary lore, unravelled from the mystic fables of antiquity. It is his, to trace the identities of King Gurgunt and the Danish Lothbroc; to establish the founder of the castle, and commemorate the achievements of its feudal lords; upon him the duty of sifting evidence, and searching out causes, of tracing the famous “Kett’s rebellion,” to the deep-seated sense of wrong in the hearts of the people, that found expression in the vague predictions and mystical prophecies of the Merlin of the district. It is for him to unfold the little germs of after-history, that he treasured up in the kernels of such documents as he order addressed to the county sheriff, to commit to prison those who refused to attend the services of the established church; to trace the growth of the spirit among the people, that opened the city gates to the army of the “Parliament,” fortified its castle against royalist soldiers, and turned its market-place into a place of execution for fellow-citizens, who dared to espouse the cause of their king; to rescue from oblivion the gems that were buried beneath the blows of the zealous puritan’s demolishing hammer; to read in the nailed horseshoes, that surmount the doorways of hundreds of its cottages, as a talisman against witchcraft, the legacy of superstition bequeathed to their descendants by these earnest “abolitionists;” to mark the _rise_ and _progress_ of the unfranchised masses in this age of enlightened liberalism, and the deepening and mellowed tone of the “voice of the people,” as it rises from the chastened and self-disciplined homes of the educated and thriving artisans. Upon him too, it devolves, to mark the age and the man—to see the monuments of the great-hearted and liberal-minded of the days gone by, in the hospitals, charities, and endowments, their munificence has showered down, from the heights of prosperity, upon the depths of poverty—to trace the progress of the philanthropist of later times, in his house to house visits, and read statistics of his labours in the renovated homes and gladdened hearts of thousands, thus lifted out from the swamps of misery and crime, by the single hand of Christian benevolence, stretched forth in sympathy; to mark the efforts of legislation to remove causes that evil results may cease, to note the patriotism of honest hearts, that would seek to level, if at all, by lifting up the poor to that standard of moral and physical comfort, beneath which the manhood of human nature has neither liberty nor room to