(3) Somewhere--somewhere--within the precincts of the great Abbey of Westminster there are said to be imprisoned in grim and forbidding seclusion unknown multitudes of witnesses, voiceless, tongueless, forgotten, whose testimony, if it could be extorted, would strangely and powerfully affect our views upon hundreds of incidents and movements, hundreds of crimes and errors and sacrifices and grand endeavours that now are very imperfectly understood, often wholly misrepresented, and some of them passed out of remembrance. Let us take an example. We have all of us heard of the _Star Chamber_. Pray may I ask my accomplished readers if they know anything about the Stars? Nay! Be not rash with thy lips. The name Star Chamber has not the remotest connection with astronomy. The name carries us back to a time when the children of Israel were swarming in England and when they were the great bankers or money-lenders--almost the only bankers and money-lenders--within the four seas. Impecunious scoundrels up and down the land mortgaged their lands or pawned their valuables, and the Jews advanced them money upon their securities. The promises to pay, the agreements to surrender property on non-payment, the bonds, the bills, the orders of court, and the documentary evidence bearing upon all these transactions between the creditors and the debtors, the borrowers and the lenders, were drawn up in the Hebrew language, and the records of these multifarious transactions between the Jews and the Christians, dating back to an unknown antiquity (possibly to a time very little after the Conquest) and _ending_ about the year 1290, when all Jews were banished from England with unspeakable acts of cruelty and wrong--these records, I say, are to be found in the archives of Westminster Abbey. These Hebrew records are believed to count by thousands, and are known by the name of _stars_ among the few who even know that there are such things in existence. As to the exact meaning or derivation of the word, I dare not venture upon an explanation of it; nor as to the correct spelling of it am I qualified to express an opinion. It is sufficient for me that the court in which these suits between the Jews and their victims, or their defrauders, were tried and decided was in ancient times called the _Star_ Chamber, because the records of the proceedings which were there adjudicated upon were popularly known as _stars_. Perhaps not six men in Britain have ever looked _intelligently_ at this mass of Hebrew MSS. I believe only one man living--Mr. Davies--has devoted any time to the study of them. And yet with this immense and unique apparatus absolutely untouched, with this virgin soil that has been neglected and unknown for six centuries, literary empirics have more than once set themselves to write the history of the Jews to the Middle Ages, “resorting to their imagination for their facts” when the facts were there at their elbows if they had only known it.