“The ‘Epitres des Princes,’ translated from the Italian by Belleforest, will probably supply you with some few things to your purpose.

“Vol. 295 among the Harleian MSS. contains little remarkable except some letters from Henry VIII’s amb’r. in Spain, in 1518, of which, you may see an abstract in the printed catalogue.

“In Dr. Hayne’s ‘Collection of State Papers in the Hatfield History,’ p. 56, is a long letter of the lord of the council of Henry VIII., in 1546, to his amb’r. with the Emperor.”

TO DR. BIRCH.

Extract from a letter of Dr. Robertson, dated College of Edinburgh, Oct. 8, 1765.

" . . .  I have met with many interruptions in carrying on my ‘Charles V.,’ partly from bad health, and partly from the avocations arising from performing the duties of my office.  But I am now within sight of land.  The historical part of the work is finished, and I am busy with a preliminary book, in which I propose to give a view of the progress in the state of society, laws, manners, and arts, from the irruption of the barbarous nations to the beginning of the sixteenth century.  This is a laborious undertaking; but I flatter myself that I shall be able to finish it in a few months.  I have kept the books you was so good as to send me, and shall return them carefully as soon as my work is done.”

* * * * *

OF VOLUMINOUS WORKS INCOMPLETE BY THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHORS.

In those “Dances of Death” where every profession is shown as taken by surprise in the midst of their unfinished tasks, where the cook is viewed in flight, oversetting his caldron of soup, and the physician, while inspecting his patient’s urinal, is himself touched by the grim visitor, one more instance of poor mortality may be added in the writers of works designed to be pursued through a long series of volumes.  The French have an appropriate designation for such works, which they call “ouvrages de longue haleine,” and it has often happened that the haleine has closed before the work.

Works of literary history have been particularly subject to this mortifying check on intellectual enterprise, and human life has not yielded a sufficient portion for the communication of extensive acquirement!  After years of reading and writing, the literary historian, who in his innumerable researches is critical as well as erudite, has still to arbitrate between conflicting opinions; to resolve on the doubtful, to clear up the obscure, and to grasp at remote researches:—­but he dies, and leaves his favourite volumes little more than a project!

Feelingly the antiquary Hearne laments this general forgetfulness of the nature of all human concerns in the mind of the antiquary, who is so busied with other times and so interested for other persons than those about him.  “It is the business of a good antiquary, as of a good man, to have mortality always before him.”