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Letters.

at Hatfield, at the Rolls House, at the Museum, and at Oxford.

My own sense of deep obligation to the Marquess of SALISBURY, for the use he has so liberally permitted me to make of the Hatfield papers, will be shared by all readers of the following Letters who take an interest in the full elucidation of that plastic epoch of our history in which RALEGH'S correspondents, as well as himself, played such great parts.

Three other original letters have been printed of Ralegh from the University Registry at Cambridge. These relate to RALEGH'S controversy with that University about the licensing of vintners in the town of Cambridge, under his Letters Patent of 1583, and during the Chancellorship of Lord BURGHLEY.

One brief, but very interesting, letter is derived from the original preserved among Bishop TANNER'S MSS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. That letter connects, by a passing but important incident, the name and enterprises of Sir FRANCIS DRAKE with those of RALEGH.

Another letter, addressed, in 1589, to the cousin and lifelong friend of RALEGH, Sir GEORGE CAREW, has been derived from that portion of the 'Carew Papers' which forms part of the collection of manuscripts brought together at Lambeth by the open-handed liberality, and the provident

love of learning, of a long series of Archbishops of Canterbury.

In common with many other inquirers who have occasionally profited by the use of that collection, the writer has had cause to regret the recent policy of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in regard to it. The closing of the Lambeth Library will, it may be hoped, subsist only for a time. But it seems (to some of those whose inquiries were abruptly broken off), the more regrettable from the notoriety of the fact, that the present Archbishop of CANTERBURY was endeavouring to enlarge the facilities for study, instead of lessening them, and that he had to permit the closing of his Library, whilst he was still urging on the Commissioners the performance of their plain duty, as well to the public at large, as to the munificence of departed benefactors, by providing adequate means for the permanent extension of its public usefulness.

Of the forty-one RALEGH Letters which are now published from transcripts-preserved in manuscript or in print-ten have been derived from one or other of those manuscript collections which have been mentioned already as being the several constituents of the Department of MSS. at the British Museum. Six others have been taken from the Rolls House MSS. One has been copied from a Bodleian manuscript at Oxford. Nearly all

Sources of the Ralegh Letters already printed.

of these seventeen MSS. are authoritative. Either
from the known character and position of the
transcriber, or from the internal evidence of the
letter itself, or from circumstantial evidence of a
collateral sort, the copies which have been printed
are, in every instance (it is believed), substan-
tially authenticated. Transcription, indeed, always
carries with it some amount or other of possible
and probable inaccuracy, verbal or literal, of which
it would be easy to find instances in copies
intended to be exact-made by a writer himself
from his own letters. The collation of copies
made at various times has been practicable in
respect of several of the RALEGH Letters, the ori-
ginals of which are either not known to exist, or
are no longer accessible. The variations have
been, in such cases, carefully noted.
In every

instance the source from which the letter has
been printed is indicated. When a transcript has
been followed, the date at which it was made.
has been stated, when known to the Editor.

As respects those of the Letters which are merely reprints, the earliest print has usually been followed. They amount, in all, to little more than one-eighth of the whole number of Letters; and at least twelve out of the twenty-two are as satisfactorily authenticated in the character of wordfor-word, though not of precisely 'literal,' copies as are the best of the manuscript copies, taken from the Harleian Collection or from the national

archives. There is no room, I think, for doubt that the four letters about the Capture of the great Carrack,' which are reprinted from STRYPE'S Annals, or the three letters, on various subjects, which are reprinted from MURDIN'S Burghley Papers (the originals having been, as it seemed, misplaced for the moment at Hatfield), were, in substance, accurately copied by STRYPE or by MURDIN respectively from the original document as it came to his hands; although neither STRYPE nor MURDIN was careful to follow the exact method of spelling words employed by the sixteenthcentury writer.

followed

transcrip

tion and printing of the

Letters.

On this orthographic point, it may here be Method said that the one hundred and twenty-five letters which are now printed from the originals are printed, literally, as RALEGH wrote them. But this faithful reproduction does not extend to a servile repetition of mere elisions, or of stenographic symbols, some of which seem to have been peculiar to the writer himself, whilst others of them were common to him and to several of his contemporaries. Sometimes, for example, he abbreviates a word by writing the consonants, and connecting them with a wavy mark or line, which stands in lieu of vowels-a sort of shorthand which is amply sufficient when one has become familiar with a man's autograph, but the imitation of which in print would answer no useful purpose. For like reasons, other and less uncommon abbre

Birch's
edition of
Ralegh's
Letters.

viations are in these volumes extended; and no attempt has been made to discriminate between short and long j, or between u and ʊ, as far as respects words which the writer himself was wont to spell sometimes with the one letter, and sometimes with the other. I have ventured to hope that the book will be read occasionally by other readers than those who have Elizabethan archæology at their fingers' ends, and to think that it is no part of an Editor's duty to print what, to the youngest of his readers, cannot but prove a puzzle, instead of printing what to every reader must needs be plain English.

The earliest of the partial collections of the Letters of Ralegh in print was that which accompanied the tract entitled The Sceptic, printed at London, in 1651. It contained only eight letters. Then followed that which forms part of the Remains, published in 1657, and therefore within the lifetime of the writer's surviving son, CAREW RALEGH, and within that of some of his own contemporaries. No important addition to these seems to have been made until Dr. THOMAS BIRCH published his edition of Sir WALTER RALEGH'S Miscellaneous Works in the year 1751. OLDYS, perhaps the most learned, certainly and incomparably the most painstaking, of RALEGH'S biographers, had, after long search, ferreted out twenty-eight letters, including as well those which

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