the task of re-writing history on a large scale.  We see issuing from the
press hundreds of monographs, biographies, editions of old texts,
selections from correspondence, or collections of statistics, mediaeval and
modern.  But the writers who (like the late Bishop Stubbs or Professor
Samuel Gardiner) undertake to tell over again the history of a long period,
with the aid of all the newly discovered material, are few indeed.  It is
comparatively easy to write a monograph on the life of an individual or a
short episode of history.  But the modern student, knowing well the mass of
material that he has to collate, and dreading lest he may make a slip
through overlooking some obscure or newly discovered source, dislikes to
stir beyond the boundary of the subject, or the short period, on which he
has made himself a specialist. 

Meanwhile the general reading public continues to ask for standard
histories, and discovers, only too often, that it can find nothing between
school manuals at one end of the scale and minute monographs at the other.
The series of which this volume forms a part is intended to do something
towards meeting this demand.  Historians will not sit down, as once they
were wont, to write twenty-volume works in the style of Hume or Lingard,
embracing a dozen centuries of annals.  It is not to be desired that they