extending to the enormous dimensions of 800 feet, written within and without with lamentation and mourning and woe. There could be no eating such a roll as that! The documents deposited in the Record Office, and which, as we have seen, are likely to have taken a hundred years to catalogue before they become readily accessible to students and explorers, count by millions. They are of all sorts, conditions, and classes, but they may be roughly described as concerned with the civil and political history of the nation; that is, they deal with the development of our institutions, with the government of our sovereigns through their ministers, with the changes in our laws and their administration, with the complex questions of the tenure of land and the changes in its ownership, with the rise and growth of our commerce, with our wars by land and by sea, with a hundred other matters which never can cease to have a profound and undying interest for the citizens of a great empire. Let us, for convenience’ sake, call the Record Office the storehouse of authorities on England’s _constitutional_ history. This vast _tabularium_, as the Romans called their Public Record Office, is situated, as I have said, within a bow-shot of Temple Bar, and to the northeast of that vanished structure. About double the same distance on the south-west there exists another huge depository of records, which may be said to be a great storehouse of authorities concerned with our _family_ history. The wills which are stored in Somerset House, though beginning at a date centuries later than the early records in Fetter Lane, go back quite far enough to make the reading of the great mass of them not always easy for the uninitiated. They, too, probably count by millions, and I have known one gentleman who estimated the number which he himself had looked at and examined with more or less attention at not less than a hundred thousand. This collection is more easily accessible to students than the other, inasmuch as here we are dealing with a single class of documents, which present no difficulties of arrangement, and which have been carefully preserved and habitually consulted for generations, and are as a rule bound up in big volumes of transcripts, or offices copies, made for the most part within a short time of the original wills having been proved before the accredited officials. So far as they go the wills in Somerset House contain to a very great extent the _genealogical_ history of England. It is necessary to guard this statement by qualifying words, for the wills in Somerset House are the wills of men and women who died in the southern province only.