THE CANADIAN JOTJRNAL. 



NEW SERIES. 



No. LXIX. — JULY, 1869 



KICARDUS CORINENSIS: 



A LITERARY MASKING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



BY DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., 

 Professor of History and Englisli Literature, University College, Toronto. 



Mr. Ricliard Grougli, ia his introduction to the " Archoeologia," 

 which was destined to be the enduring repertory of English Antiquities, 

 labours to establish a becoming age for the Society of Antiquaries itself. 

 According to him, that brotherhood of antiquarian devotees had its 

 origin in the great era of religious and intellectual revolution to which 

 Queen Elizabeth's name is fitly applied, when men of the highest 

 intellect, possessed by the new ideas of the age, were struggling for the 

 world's emancipation from the thraldom of antiquity. In the year 

 1572, a few eminent English scholars, under the auspices of Arch- 

 bishop Parker and Sir Robert Cotton, assembled at the house of the 

 latter, and formed themselves into a society for the preservation of the 

 ancient monuments of their country. The British Museum Library is 

 the enduring memorial of the labours of one of those conservators of 

 national antiquities, in an age of revolution. But it is to a far different 

 age, and to a very diverse reign, we must turn, for the actual founda- 

 tion of the Society of Antiquaries. Not in the earnest, progressive era 

 of Queen Elizabeth, but in that most unearnest of centuries with which 

 Queen Anne's name is fitly associated : a body of gentlemen, not less 

 zealous, though of far inferior note to their precursors of the sixteenth 

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