Such men as Dr. Bensley of Norwich are few and far between. Gentlemen whose duties involve many hours a day of arduous and exhausting labour can only devote their leisure moments to research, and when they do so they are in danger of getting something less than thanks as their reward. The chivalrous and splendid enthusiasm of the late Mr. Wickenden at Lincoln, of Dr. Sheppard at Canterbury, of Canon Raine at York, has laid us under profound obligation, but in each and all of these instances the labour of long years has been a labour of love, and the very permission to engage and continue in it has been conceded as a privilege conferred upon the toiler. Or again, when the fascination which “musty parchments” exercise over some minds has irresistibly impelled such generous students as Archdeacon Chapman of Ely, the late Canon Swainson of Chichester, or Mr. Symonds of Norwich, to make sacrifices of time and money in the preservation or deciphering or calendaring the precious documents to which their position as members of the chapter gave them free access, they have found some portion of their recompense in the wonder and astonishment of the Philistines that any human being could undertake and carry on so much _without being paid for it_. A registrar is a functionary whose duty it is to keep a register of what _is_ going on from day to day. I suspect it is very seldom part of his duty to find out what people were doing or recording long before he was born. At any rate it is no part of his duty to find that out for you, or to teach you where and how to look for what you want to discover. So with the parson of a parish. For the most part he is possessed by a conviction that if he loses his registers something dreadful will happen to him; and accordingly when he goes away for a holiday he leaves his cook in charge, with a solemn warning that she is to let no one see “the books” except in her presence and under her eye; and a very awful eye it sometimes is. But who of us has not been kindly and frankly told by a genial brother that if we want such or such an entry copied we must come and copy it ourselves, for that our good-natured correspondent cannot make out the old writing? As to the churchwardens, assuming that they are to be looked upon as responsible for the custody of the parochial evidences, to talk of them as keepers of ancient MSS. is a little too ridiculous. It is true that there are in my vestry two dilapidated parish chests, which once presumably were full of wills and deeds and conveyances and evidences, which if they were now forthcoming, might considerably disturb the equanimity of some personages here and there; but those old chests are used as coal-bins now, and have been so used from times to which the memory of man doth not extend. I could tell some odd stories of my experience as a dryasdust in days when I employed my leisure hours in peeping into the dens and caves of the earth.