I shall not detain the reader over the work achieved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The learning of a Selden or of a Madox is astounding, and a student of the present day has to consult them constantly on particular questions; but they never had in mind to embrace the history of their country as a whole. Facts are brought into a system by Coke, but the system is strictly a legal one; undigested historical knowledge is made to yield the necessary store of leading cases, and, quite apart from the naive perversion of most particulars, the entire view of the subject is thoroughly opposed to historical requirements, for it makes the past an illustration of the present, and regards it as planned on the same lines. There is no lack of books setting forth historical proof for some favourite general thesis or arranging facts according to some general idea, but such attempts were distinguished by unbounded imagination and by endless sacrifices of fact to the object of the writer's devotion. The curious literary byplay to the struggle of political party which Aug. Thierry[3] has artistically illustrated in France from the writings of Boulainvilliers and Dubos, Mably and Lézardière, could certainly be matched in England by a tale of the historical argumentation of Brady[4], or Petyt[5], or Granville Sharp. Nothing can be more eloquent in a sense than the title given by this last author to his book on the system of frankpledge:--"An account of the Constitutional English Polity of Congregational Courts, and more particularly of the great annual court of the people, called the View of Frankpledge, wherein the whole body of the Nation was arranged into the regular divisions of Tythings, Hundreds, etc.:--the happy effect of that excellent institution, in preventing robberies, riots, etc., whereby, in law, it was justly deemed 'Summa et maxima securitas:'--that it would be equally beneficial to all other nations and countries, as well under monarchical as republican establishments; and that, to the English Nation in particular, it would afford an effectual means of reforming the corruption of Parliament by rendering the representation of the people perfectly equal, in exact numerical proportion to the total number of householders throughout the whole realm[6]."