uman 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."

As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his best attention to this
branch of study, and what the ancients had written about England was
intimately known to him. Any one who looks at his book will see that
the first 180 pages of the _Britannia_ could be written by a scholar
without stirring fro