quality in common, that their buyer acquires a sound property upon a rising market. In the words of The Times describing the Victoria History — ' Everybody knows what sort of a book was the normal old- fashioned county history. It was commonly the work of one man, laborious in the extreme, praiseworthy, decorous and dull. It ran to three or four immense volumes, with steel plates of churches and gentlemen's seats, good maps according to the lights of those days, and a good index. Sometimes, as in a few of the Yorkshire histories, a factitious value was lent to the books by the drawings specially made by Turner, which soared as high above reality as the prose of the author sank below it. But the real fault of the county history of this type was that the local aspect of things was not presented in its proper relation to the history of the country as a whole. The spirit in which the book was written was too commonly the spirit of the topographer. Every local unit remained a unit; the writer, as a rule, had his county or his township so much before his eyes that he paid no atten- tion to the wider aspects of the national life. Nor was it possible that the idea of development, which is the root idea of the modern historian, could take any great place in the older local histories. Probably many excellent local historians of to-day would be guilty of the same faults if they were left to do their work alone ; but the organization of the Victoria History is such as to prevent this. What County History may be, in the hands of no one man, but in the hands of a national company of scholars, the Victoria County History sets forth to prove. That the story it has to tell should be dull is heresy for an Englishman to believe ; that it is, as a fact, far from being dull, a glance at the volumes of the Victoria History already published will convince the greatest sceptic' Nowadays we are a restless people, ever on the move, for the most part regarding a seven years' lease as chaining us unduly to a house. Many a man does not know the very name of his great-grandfather, and whence that remote ancestor may have come is as obscure as the origin of the Aryans. Having no tie of place or blood such a man may reasonably contend that the discovery of his own pedigree, though it were for thirty generations back, would move him no more than any other string of names. Yet could we present before him that pedigree in flesh and blood — could he see his grandfather in high stock and hessians, his great-grandfather in powdered hair and top-boots, his great-great-grandfather in ruffled cufFs, bob-wig and three-cornered hat, and even the first of his name- — franklin, yeoman, or Piers the Plow-
