A POPULAR ACCOUNT OF THE VICTORIA HISTORY WHEN this great series of the County Histories was first planned the approval of our late Sovereign Lady was sought and gained, the Queen became patroness of the work, watching its growth with interest and giving it her own name as the Victoria History of the Counties of England. By her orders a set of the whole series was to be reserved for the royal library at Windsor, and to her memory the work is inscribed in the hope that it may prove a worthy memorial of her illustrious reign. That reign saw the beginning of many great literary enterprises whose monumental scale sets them amongst national achievements. The Dictionary of National Biography^ whose additional volumes are closing with the biography of the great Queen, is a work of which no nation has seen the fellow ; and the English Dictionary^ now midway in its labours, stands a tall head and shoulders above the nearest of its foreign rivals. But vast as these undertakings may be the Victoria History competes with them in friendly rivalry. Its bulk is the least of its claims, but the fires of Peking, which burned the sole perfect copy of the half- mythical Chinese Encyclopaedia, have made an end of the one book which could compare with it in size. The complete History itself marshals a hundred and sixty volumes, and to these are added the supplementary volumes containing the pedigrees of the county families, so that it will be seen that it is almost a library in itself for those who desire the complete series, rather than a book which is in the course of making. Such a neglected study has been the history of our own towns and fields that it may be well that the public should learn what county his- tory should be. And yet from the seventeenth century to the earlier years of the century now gone by many score tall folios and fat quartos of county history came through the press, among the most noteworthy being those of Surrey by Manning and Bray, Eyton's Shropshire^ Nichols' Leicestershire^ Hutchins' Dorsetshire^ and Blomfield's Norfolk, As a rule however, for all but the determined antiquary or grubber of pedigrees, the county history of the past has been for the most part too dull for general perusal. Still, old and new, county histories have one
