of Coventry.  Once open to the general public, although then at the close of its first quarter of a century, the Britannia flourished with a new lease of life, and continued to bloom, like a literary magnolia, all down the seventeenth century.  It Is now as little read as other famous books of uncompromising size.  The bookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception of these heroic folios, and if we want British antiquities now, we find them in terser form and more accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in the writings of later antiquaries.  Giant Camden moulders at his cave’s mouth, a huge and reverend form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by.  But his once popular folio was the life work of a particularly interesting and human person; and without affecting to penetrate to the darkest corners of the cavern, it may be instructive to stand a little while on the threshold.

When this first English edition of the Britannia was published, Camden was one of the most famous of living English writers.  For one man of position who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be twenty, at least, who were quite familiar with the claims of the Head-master of Westminster and Clarenceux King-of-Arms.  Camden was in his sixtieth year, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, violent detraction, and final triumph.  His health was poor, but he continued to write history, eager, as he says, to show that “though I have been a studious admirer of venerable antiquity, yet have I not been altogether an incurious spectator of modern occurrences.”  He stood easily first among the historians of his time; he was respected and adored by the Court and by the Universities, and that his fame might be completed by the chrism of detraction, his popularity was assured from year to year by the dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists scattered from their secret presses.  It had not been without a struggle that Camden had attained this pinnacle; and the Britannia had been his alpenstock.

This first English edition has the special interest of representing Camden’s last thoughts.  It is nominally a translation of the sixth Latin edition, but it has a good deal of additional matter supplied to Philemon Holland by the author, whereas later English issues containing fresh material are believed to be so far spurious.  The Britannia grew with the life of Camden.  He tells us that it was when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on his professional career as second master in Westminster School, that the famous Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortelius, “dealt earnestly with me that I would illustrate this isle of Britain.”  This was no light task to undertake in 1577.  The authorities were few, and these in the highest degree occasional or fragmentary.  It was not a question of compiling a collection of topographical antiquities.  The whole process had to be gone through “from the egg.”