III.] FRANCE AND BELGIUM. for publishing the records of Scottish burgh life. All the efforts as yet made in England in that direction have been the result of local and personal interest excited by merely antiquarian curiosity. It is time that this went further. It is time too, as I said before, not only that we had a feudal map of England before the manorial boundaries are wiped away, but that we had a careful collection of manorial customs : such a codification in fact, as is possible, of the ancient unwritten popular law as it is preserved in these most ancient shadows and skeletons of the early life of our fathers. And so I come round to the point where I digressed. We may take pattern by the Germans in collecting these relics, but when we have done so we shall have to bring them to comparison with the similar German collections before we can extract the whole lesson that they would convey. I would not be too sanguine, but I honestly believe that such a comparison would reveal to us points of contact and divergency as yet unsuspected' even by the most careful investigators, and would enable us to reproduce the ancient society of our common ancestry in a way that would speedily set at rest some of the most controverted questions of institutional history. In such an investigation we might rely on the help of the greatest foreign scholars ; and it is a task to the performance of which every intelligent country gendeman could contribute an appreciable share without stirring from his own muniment room. If we turn to France and Belgium, we shall find work of the same kind going on, which is only second, if it be indeed second, to the historical industry of Germany. The re-issue of the Recueil des Historiens de France, of the Gallia Chris tiana, and the Acta Sanctorum, proves that the revival is begun at the right end, from the ecclesiastical side. The re production, in the great Patrologia of Migne, of the early