HISTORICAL BRANCH OF THE RECORD OFFICE.
IN our Postscript last week we stated the intention of forming a new department under the Master of the Rolls, in connexion with the Record Office, for the publication of original documents in the national repository, which bear upon the history, and constitution of the realm ; and in the very moment of making the announcement, we strongly asserted the absolute necessity of keeping the management of this department under the Master himself. This is the plan, and it is of the greatest importance. If we are asked why we rest so strongly upon that particular condition, we should point to attempts which we can scarcely call similar in their design, and which we trust are the very opposite in their result, for they ended in ludicrous failure. There were formerly attempts to bring forward documents lying among the records, but the selection was placed in the hands of persons who were not appointed with any proper eye to the work which had to be done ; they were taken from the Cabinet Ministers, high officers of state, who were persons with plenty to do already, and no natural congeniality ; and the inevitable consequence of that arrangement was, that the whole business fell upon the secretary ; and the secretary did what he liked. The last two Commissions sprang from a very eminent circle—the Holland House coterie; and though that circle was by many, especially by its own members, deemed wiser, wittier, and more popularly welcome than any coterie which ever existed, it was still a coterie, using its opportunities to serve its own purposes. Thus some public objects were frustrated. England possesses complete and unrivalled muniments; but by her neglect of them, she is actually, behind France, Prussia, Italy, Denmark, and even Russia, in the materials rendered available for her constitutional history. We will not rest this only on our own assertion. Before the Select Committee on the Record Commission in 1836, Mr. Hallam, the eminent historian, himself a Record Commissioner, gave evidence which we shall copy. Mr. Ffallam, indeed, has been less distinguished by research than by the combining of information which other persons had already collected, placing it in a new light, and aaorning it with the freshness of his statements. But the very fact that a man should write the constitutional history of England without referring to the original records, shows at once the seclusion in which those documents had been immured, and the habit which had crept upon our public writers of leaving them to slumber. If we were to complain of Mr. Hallam, perhaps it might not be so much that he did not use the documents in Ms history, as that when the question was raised he did not throw himself more effectually into the endeavour to bring forth these written monuments. The fact proves how completely the coterie from which the Commission sprang was unsuited to the work which was intrusted to it. We quote from the Report of the Committee.
Chairman [Mr. Charles Bailer]—" You published a work on the Middle Ages, in 1818. "—"I did."
"You published another edition of that in 1819 ? "—" I did."
"Is not a law portion of the work, amounting to about one-third, devoted to the constitutional history of England? "—"A portion of it is ; not quite so much as a third." "Is there in all that portion any single quotation from the works of the Record Commisaion ? "—" There must be references to the edition of the Statutes of the Realm."
"On the subjects of which you treated in that work, particularly the jurisdiction of the King's Council, was there any information to be derived from any publications of the Record Commission, either in 1818 or 1819?" —" I cannot say that I have examined, so much as I ought to have done, all publications then existing. I do not know that upon the subject of King's Council I referred to any publications of the Record Commission : I had recourse to Lord Hale's History." "The question is, what practical benefit you have derived from these works, which are supposed to have had such a beneficial effect upon historians ? "—" I am not able to say that I have derived any considerable benefit from them."
If we understand rightly, the present plan differs essentially from that which condemned itself by its failure, as much as the character of the present Commission differs from the last. The Commission has more distinctly become the branch of a public department. The new project originates with the Master of the Rolls ; he has made himself responsible for it; and, leppily, he appears to understand his responsibility in the gravest souse, for III seems determined to keep the control in his own hands. In one sense, the office of the Master of the Rolls will be rendered tantamount to that of the Minister of Public Instruction in France ; and Heavenknows that we need such an office. He will then be noting in (*Operation with one of the most important sections of the Privy Council—the Educational Committee. He will in fact be bringing forward sources of instruction for the community higher than any which we at present command. Since Mr. Hallam gave the evidence which we have quoted, there has been a decided tendency to improve in reference to original documents ; but there is some reason to suppose that the material brought forward in the working of the new department will be of the greatest value ; facts, the evidence which they furnish, and the conclusions which they justify, no longer being filtered second-hand through book after book, each borrowing from its predecessor. Already we have seen some of the light which can be thrown upon history by such a process. But by the new branoh of the Record Office, we may expect a large mass of new material to be placed at the service of our historical literature,
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