as soon encounter a roll of papyrus, or a monkish manuscript charter of the thirteenth century. The singular history of the Paston Letters' has of late acquired renewed interest. They found their way from divers repositories, previously to 1787, into the possession of Mr. Fenn of East Dereham, in Norfolk, afterwards Sir Richard; described by Horace Walpole as a smatterer in antiquity, but a very good sort of man.' Mr. Fenn arranged and published the two first volumes, with a "very lengthy title.' Their appearance at once excited considerable attention, mainly owing to the interest taken in them by Walpole himself, who, whatever amount of frivolity may have attached to his tastes, was au fond a zealous and a discerning student of English antiquity. These letters,' he said, ' make to me all other letters not worth reading.' Hannah More, no doubt in common with many other literary personages at that time, was of a different opinion. The letters, she declared, were quite barbarous in style, with none of the elegance of their supposed contemporary Rowley! They might be of some use to correct history, but as letters and fine reading, nothing was to be said for them!' Nevertheless

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"The Paston Letters" (Mr. Gairdner continues) were soon in every one's hands. The work appeared (1787) under royal patronage; for Fenn had got leave beforehand to dedicate it to the King as the avowed patron of antiquarian knowledge. . . . A whole edition was disposed of in a week; and a second edition called for, which, after undergoing some little revision with the assistance of Mr. George Steevens, the Shakspearian editor, was published the same year. Meanwhile, to gratify the curious, the original MS. letters were deposited for a time in the library of the Society of Antiquaries; but the King having expressed a wish to see them, Fenn sent them to the palace, requesting that if they were thought worthy of a place in the royal collection, his Majesty would be pleased to accept them. They were accordingly added to the royal library, and as an acknowledgment of the value of the gift, Fenn was summoned to court, and received the honour of knighthood.'

Here begins the problematical part of the history. To the King the letters certainly went; but, like George II.'s will, when he carried it off from council in his pocket, from his Majesty they never returned. The originals of the first two ⚫ volumes are missing, though they were presented to the King in 1787, bound in three volumes, and, no doubt, the binding was a handsome one.' All search to recover them has

hitherto proved fruitless. There is a tradition that they were last seen in the hands of Queen Charlotte, who, it is supposed, must have lent them to one of her ladies in attendance. (?) If so, it is strange that they should have been lost

sight of. They are not in the library of King George III., which is now in the British Museum, nor do they appear in any of the Royal palaces. The late Prince Consort, just before his death, instituted a search which he had great hope would at last bring them to light. I have been informed 'that it has since been completed, but the missing originals ' remain still unaccounted for.'

Singularly enough, the history of the remaining part of the work is subject to difficulties and obscurities almost equally great. A third and fourth volume were published by Mr., now become Sir Richard, Fenn. The collective originals of these have never been recovered; but it happens that the 'first document in volume iii. has been actually found, and 6 is now in the British Museum.'

Volume v. was published, several years afterwards, by the late Serjeant Frere; of this, also, the MS. was altogether lost sight of. The consequence of these strange deficiencies was, that an ingenious littérateur,' as Mr. Gairdner terms him, raised critical doubts, which were acknowledged by some as plausible, respecting the authenticity of the whole series. This was done in an article which appeared in the Fortnightly Review.' Its appearance set the descendant of the editor, Mr. Philip Frere, on a new search; and the originals of volume v. were actually discovered at last in an old box at his house in Norfolk. Those who were present at the following meeting of the Society of Antiquaries may well remember their triumphant production in the very presence of the unlucky sceptic, who was forced to recant, and to carry his faggot with the best grace he could. Since that time, without going into the farther particulars recorded by Mr. Gairdner, it may suffice to say, that full examination by the most competent judges in England has removed all reasonable doubt of authenticity. And if the fifth volume be unquestionably genuine, there can be no cause left for entertaining any suspicion respecting the other four, although their originals have so strangely vanished. The contents of the unbound volumes have apparently made their way into many hands. What Mr. Philip Frere could discover, he made over to the British Museum, where they rest at last. Much has probably perished. But the genuineness of the whole work is, as it were, indisputably established by secondary evidence; and Mr. Gairdner was quite right in not delaying his publication for the possibility of their reappearance. There is no apparent reason," he says, in self-justification, why MSS. which have remained ⚫ undiscovered for more than eighty years should not remain

so eighty years longer, if the indifference or the accident, whatever it may be, which has caused them to be overlooked, be made an argument against turning to the best account those which we virtually possess.'

On the infinite historical value of these relics of old English life it is quite unnecessary to dilate. They have furnished a mine of raw material, for these eighty years past, to our most industrious explorers. Probably, to those who have studied the correspondence in a general way, there are two features which have come most prominently into notice. The first is the fundamental likeness which they establish between the aspect of society in their age, and in our or any age. After all, the tastes, interests, family attachments, personal hopes and fears of men, 'quicquid agunt homines,' do not vary so much in the course of centuries as our first fancies would lead us to imagine. The metal is the same, the setting only different. In the Paston Letters' we meet with personages of the better class in all periods of life. The Eton schoolboy, the anxious maiden, the match-making mother, the resolute woman of business, the poor cousin, the family counsellor, the chief of the house himself, full of party politics, but fuller still of plans of pecuniary gain and personal aggrandisement—are there, all busy as they on earth were busy, and as, with superficial differences only, their descendants of the twelfth generation are busy to this day. The lesson is a very obvious one, but it is not therefore the less strange to some of our preconceived notions, nor the less amusing. The other feature which we would notice is one in which the Paston times-the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries generally-did nevertheless exhibit characteristics somewhat peculiarly their own. It was an age in which the two great methods of enforcing claims and rights-private war and litigation-were mingled together, or alternated with each other, after a fashion scarcely comprehensible either in more eivilised or in less civilised days. All the Paston family are deeply engaged in endless lawsuits. The progress of these suits, the hopes and discouragements of the parties, present a constant and somewhat wearisome store of family communication. But yet, at the same time, people were very far indeed from having renounced the earlier and more summary method of self-defence and retaliation. Why don't you take good 'cudgels, and settle it?' says Counsellor Pleydell to Dandie Dinmont, touching his march-suit with Jock of DawstonCleugh. Odd, sir! we tried that three times already; but I 'dinna ken; we're both gey good at single stick, and it could 'na weel be judged.' Then take broadswords, and be damned

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to you, as your fathers did before you.' Aweel, sir, if ye 'think it wadna be again the law, it's all one to Dandie.' Social development,' in the Paston neighbourhood, had just reached the same point of ambiguity as among Scott's imaginary Liddesdale borderers. An instance or two, out of a great number, will illustrate our meaning. John Paston (1448) is disturbed in his claim to the manor of Gresham by Lord Molynes. His lordship listened to the counsels of John Heydon of Baconsthorpe, a lawyer, who had been sheriff and also recorder of Norwich, and whom the gentry of Norfolk looked upon with anything but good will.' Heydon persuaded Lord Molynes that his claim was good; and Lord Molynes, without more ado, went in and took possession.' To go to law with Lord Molynes, a powerful young nobleman 'connected with various wealthy and influential families,' was no light undertaking for an esquire. Paston first tried the intercession of the Church through the medium of Bishop Waynflete; but this also failed him. Then he resorted to re

prisals. He

'took and held possession of the mansion; and for some time without opposition. But at last, while John Paston was away in the country on business, there came before the mansion at Gresham a company of a thousand persons, armed with cuirasses and brigandines, with guns, bows and arrows, and with every kind of offensive and defensive armour. They had also mining instruments, long poles with hooks, called cromes, used for pulling down houses, ladders, pickaxes, and pans with fire burning in them. With these formidable instruments they beset the house, at that time occupied only by Margaret Paston and twelve other persons; and having broken open the outer gates, they set to work undermining the very chamber in which Margaret was. Resistance under the circumstances was impossible. Margaret was forcibly carried out. The house was then rifled of all that it contained-property estimated by John Paston at 2001-the doorposts were cut asunder, and the place was left little better than a ruin.'

The war of the Roses would seem to have cut short the promising quarrel, tam Marte quam Mercurio, which the learned counsellor Heydon had started. The character of Sir John Fastolf, of Caistor Castle, the hero of so large a portion of the correspondence, evidences quite as forcibly this double characteristic of the times. He was constantly in arms for the Crown abroad, and occasionally in affairs of his own at home. Nevertheless, as Mr. Gairdner says, "from the general tenor of his ' letters we should certainly no more suspect him of being the 'old soldier that he actually was, than of being Shakspeare's fat, disorderly knight.' Almost every sentence in them refers to

▲ lawsuits and title deeds, extortions and injuries received from others, forged processes altering property, writs of one kind or another to be issued against his adversaries, libels uttered against himself, and matters of the like description. Altogether the perusal is apt to give us an impression that Sir John would have made an acute and able, though perhaps not very high-minded solicitor. . . . The familiarity shown even by Fastolf with all the forms and processes of the law is probably due not so much to the peculiarities of his personal character as to the fact that a knowledge of legal technicalities was much more widely diffused in that day than in ours. . . . The" Paston Letters afford ample evidence that every man who had property to protect, if not every well-educated woman also, was perfectly well versed in the ordinary forms of legal processes.'

Altogether, these disclosures to a certain extent remind us of the state of things of which some of us have made personal experience, and others have heard and read at secondhand, as prevalent in some of the Western States of America in recent or present days. The spirit of technical law, and the spirit of Lynch law, divide the sway between them. The lawyers have on the whole the best of it; they are the real masters of the situation; but their influence is largely assisted by that of the bowie-knife and the revolver. And one aftergrowth of this condition of society-a condition through which probably all communities must more or less pass-is the luxuriance of the great legal profession. Our English peerage offers abundant evidence of its aspiring tendencies, and at no period of our history, probably, have the foundations of great legal families been more extensively laid than in the fifteenth century.

Thus much by way of preface to the records of that distinguished Cornish family of which the memoirs have now been recovered and arranged, with most painful and religious care, by its two modern representatives-Sir Walter Trevelyan, of antiquarian celebrity, and Sir Charles, with whose name and reputation our readers will have long become familiar; a reputation acquired in many fields very different from that of homely English genealogy. We have before us three volumes of Trevelyan Papers,' printed for the Camden Society; two under the supervision of Mr. Payne Collier (1855 and 1862), the third and last, and by far the most valuable, by the two kinsmen-editors whose names we have just cited. The two first are chiefly filled with deeds, household accounts, and similar instruments, and curious to antiquarians alone; not the least so, perhaps, from the extraordinary variety of arbitrary spelling which they exhibit, such as would drive the Educational Institute of Scotland to despair of reconstructing