Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion. HOFFMAN NICKERSON. _34, West 54 Street, New York, N.Y. January, 1923._ PREFACE. Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past. The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began. In the first place it was not thorough. In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition. Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions. But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then, however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it is harmful and it had better not have been written at all. These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.