I am in the habit of assuring my lowly congregation upon Sundays that for all their talk about heaven they would find themselves very much out of place there without some previous preparation for that desirable abode. The same warning is equally true when applied to other blissful resting-places besides the celestial mansions. You must have a taste for them; you must have qualified yourself to enjoy them and to mix with the company you find there. Surely Valhalla could only have suited the few. But this place of resort of which I am thinking is a pleasure-house whose resources are actually limitless, however well you may have learnt to use your opportunities. “Life piled on life were all too little” to get even so much knowledge of this prodigious and enormous accumulation of treasures as to be able to answer with certainty what may be found there and what not. For eight-and-forty years there has appeared annually a _Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records_, presenting us with an elaborate summary of work carried on by the functionaries employed in examining our national archives; and so far are we from getting to the end of the work of men cataloguing and calendaring that it may reasonably be estimated another fifty years will be required to complete this vast preliminary labour; and when that time comes it will be necessary to begin again at summarizing and supplying indices to the reports issued. What next will follow it is difficult to conjecture or imagine. The forty-eighth Report, issued in 1887, happens to be lying at my elbow as I write, and there, ready for consultation, I find a brief calendar of the Patent Rolls of the seventh year of Edward the First, drawn up by one of the many accomplished archivists of the Office. It fills 216 closely printed pages. It summarizes at least 3,000 documents, some of them of considerable length; they all belong to a single class, and they are all concerned with the life of our forefathers--yours and mine, my estimable reader--during the single year ending the 20th of November, 1279. Six centuries ago. Think of that! Yet this collection is but one among thousands. The third Report, issued in 1842, first drew attention to the existence of a huge mass of ancient letters of the reigns of King John, Henry the Third, and Edward the First, the most modern of them, observe, coming down no nearer to our own time than the year 1307 A.D. “This important mass,” we are told, “appears to contain 1,942 bundles, each containing on the average about 200 documents, or about 388,400 on the whole.” Scared by such figures as these, the imagination, a trifle jaded, refuses to dwell upon 913 Papal Bulls of various dates, or to take the trouble to speculate upon the probable bulk of seven or eight thousand documents which reveal unknown secrets about the ancient forests and their boundaries. But we are fairly aghast at the news that there are hundreds of rolls averaging 200 feet in length, and at least one