s in 1871,
and which has since been reprinted in the volume of 'English Studies,'
published shortly after the author's death in 1879. English History owes
a larger debt to few men of our time than it owes to Mr. Brewer. As a
teacher whose pupils were always eager to listen to all that fell from
his lips, and whose enthusiasm never failed to awake a kindred spark in
the minds of those who looked to him for light in dark places and
guidance along tortuous paths of research, Mr. Brewer has had few
equals, and perhaps has left no successor who can compare with him. As a
writer he was always brilliant, lucid, and vigorous, and his unrivalled
'Introductions' to the Calendars of Letters and Papers, concerned with
the reign of Henry VIII., will long continue to be read by all students
of our History, as necessary and indispensable interpreters of the vast
storehouses of original documents which he did so much to rescue from
the oblivion or obscurity to which they had previously been consigned.
But it was as an organizer of research that Mr. Brewer earned his
greatest fame and achieved his greatest success, and it was to him more
than to any one man, to his immense persistence in urging upon the
powers that be a more generous freedom of access to our Records, and to
his prodigious powers of work in arranging and tabulating the enormous
masses of documents of all kinds which constitute the _Apparatus_ of
English History, that this country stands indebted, and will remain
indebted as long as our literature lasts.

In the Essay on 'New Sources of English History' the learned author has
given us a startling account of the deplorable condition into which some
of the most precious of our national manuscripts had been allowed to
fall--of the utterly chaotic state of our depositories--of the
hopelessness, the despair which must needs have come upon one student
after another who might be fortunate enough to be turned loose into the
various prison-houses of our muniments--and of the efforts made, and
happily at last made with splendid success, to cleanse the Augean
stable, and to let the world know something of the wealth it contained.
With characteristic modesty Mr. Brewer said nothing of his own part in
all that laborious and sagacious organization which resulted in our
obtaining the magnificent _Calendars_, which have opened out to us all
'that new world which is the old' that had become almost forgotten or
unknown. He was not the man