Dr. Round's Last Papers
Family Origins and Other Studies. By the late J. Horace Round. Edited with a Memoir and Bibliography tic NVilliam Page. (Constable. 2.1s. )
TttE late Dr. lioninfs genealogical learning has probably never been equalled and this last volume of his papers, en- riched with a valuable memoir and an invaluable bibliography, will be priced by all mediaevalists and genealogists. and there is much that is of absorbing interest to the non-expert who is willing to make sonic effort of attention. Dr. hound's ,awn genealogy is interesting : through one grandinot law he traced his descent to the first three Edwards, Kings of England through another he was desecrated from the distinguished family of the brothers Smith who wrote Rejected A &trews : and one of Hound's sisters is said to have been the original of the Laura in Pendennis. Whether Round's early interest in genealogy was due to his own family history we do not know. On the whole it is unlikely that this was a determining reason of his intensely studious temperament ; on the other hand. an important cause was undoubtedly his delicate health which from childhood debarred hint front many activities.
Horace Round's health was good enough for hint to be sent to Oxford and some of the most amusing and enlightening of his letters are about the celebrities whom he encountered there. Jowett lie liked and respected little. llis sermons are pro- nounced uncertain, and he is ridiculed for declaring that " miracles were not a fundamental point of faith, that they were prima facie impossible, and, if possible, were not esta- blished." Jowctt got "that arch-heretic" Colenso to preach, although the Bishop of Oxford had forbidden him to preach in Carfax Church. In Balliol ('hapel, Colenso denounced the Flood, and " ended," wrote Round, " with a word of encourage- ment to the wicked, that is, a pious hope in the impossibility of eternal punishment." These youthful judgments on the preachers whom he heard tell us something of the future scholar which is absent from the mere record that he took a second in "Muds," and a first in History and sat at the feet of Stubbs.
Apparently Round's first attempt at journalism was an article on Burke's Landed Gentry, it subject which, in a sense, he never left. From first to last he had an overpowering
interest in genealogy and the services which his great fear g enabled him to perform were acknowledged when in 191-4 he was appointed Honorary historical Adviser to the Crown in peerage cases. his conception of the value and importancx) of genealogical study is well set out in the paper reprinted in this volume which he read before the International Congress of Historical Studies in London in 1913. Ile was aware that genealogy is a branch of study of which the utility can easily be overrated, but he maintained that for the illustration of Domesday Book it was " essential," for the history of the feudal baronage as affecting the history of the nation its use was " very great," and its aid not to be despised in Tudor and post-Tudor times. Amusing instances arc given of some of the results of the appetite for ancestors which marked the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Queen Elizabet 11 set an example by adopting a pedigree tracing her descent back to Adam. James I was delightedly content with a pedigree in which the record of his ancestry stopped with " Brute, the most noble founder of the Britains " (sic).
Against the consequences of Elizabethan genealogical exuberance Dr. Round was never tired of inveighing, and he deplored such traces of it as still disfigured the work of the Heralds College. His passion for accuracy not unnaturally involved him in a good many quarrels and disputes and the whole of his writings, including this latest volume, hears testimony to it. He ahnost seems to delight ill nailing down genealogical lies as much as the fowler delights in nailing up vermin. For Burke his contempt is large. The Complete Peerage, of course, has his respect, but no authority however great escapes his criticism altogether. Professor Tait's judgment that his genius was critical rather than constructive, if an incomplete one, contains an important truth. We feel that we wish, irreverently, to connect his love of bowling out opponents with his strange habit of finishing a long genealogical discussion by descending from his library to the ball below by means of sliding down the baluster rails.
In the present volume there are three papers of especial value and general interest to historians, those on " Reliefs,"
" The Prise of Wines," and on " Burh-Lot " and " Brig-bot." The interest of these is, of course, rather technical, though less so than the studies of the origins of the Cavendishes, the Churchills, the Walpoles, the Nevilles and Bulmers, the Mildmays, the Ileneages, the Granvilles and Monks, the Yes-boroughs and others. Dr. Round was too great a scholar to risk many generalizations and there are few in this book. One of the rare instances is in the paper which opens with the words : " Apart from fortunate marriages, the leading English families have owed their rise to three great sources : success- ful trade, the law, and the spoils of monastic houses." Coining from Dr. Round the words have an impressiveness which their content at first sight only partly seems to justify. Yet they give a sort of epitome of a genealogical knowledge probably never equalled before and most unlikely ever to be attained again.
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