10 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
that a few words upon that subject may be not with- 
out interest. 
Let us be thankful to our forefathers in the old 
country that they did not wilfully burn their public 
documents, but only hid them here and there, in gar- 
rets and cellars, sheds and stables, where, but for a 
merciful Providence, fire and vermin would long ago 
have made an end of them. In 1550 it was discovered 
that some important Chancery records had been eaten 
away by the lime in the wall against which they re- 
posed, and a few years afterward Queen Elizabeth 
undertook to have suitable storage provided for all 
such things in the Tower of London. What passed 
for suitable storage we may learn from a letter written 
a hundred years later to King Charles II. by William 
Prynne, Keeper of the Records: “I endeavoured the 
rescue of the greatest part of them from that desola- 
tion, corruption, confusion, in which (through the 
negligence, nescience, or slothfulness of their former 
keepers) they had for many years by past lain buried 
together in one confused chaos under corroding, 
putrefying cobwebs, dust, filth, in the dark corner of 
Czesar’s Chapel in the White Tower, as mere useless 
reliques. . . . The old clerks [were] unwilling to 
touch them for fear of fouling their fingers, spoiling 
their clothes, endangering their eyesight and healths 
by their cantankerous dust and evil scent. In raking 
up this dung-heap . . . I found many rare, ancient, 
precious pearls and golden records. But all [these] 
will require Briareus his hundred hands, Argus his 
hundred eyes, and Nestor’s centuries of years, to 
marshal them into distinct files, and make exact 
alphabetical tables of the several things, names, places 
