ant hence, of Sayer, the poet, philanthropist,
philosopher, and antiquarian, whose memory is still green in the hearts
of many of the great and good still living, and the remembrance of whose
friendship is esteemed by them among their choicest treasures.

The historian has a yet wider field for labour, and a busier work to do,
to connect into one chain the links that lie scattered far and wide,
among deserted thoroughfares, decaying mansion houses, desecrated
churches, and monastic ruins; to gather up the broken fragments of
political records, enshrined in many a mouldering parchment, crumbling
stone, or withered tree; and to weave into a whole the threads of
tradition and legendary lore, unravelled from the mystic fables of
antiquity. It is his, to trace the identities of King Gurgunt and the
Danish Lothbroc; to establish the founder of the castle, and commemorate
the achievements of its feudal lords; upon him the duty of sifting
evidence, and searching out causes, of tracing the famous "Kett's
rebellion," to the deep-seated sense of wrong in the hearts of the
people, that found expression in the vague predictions and mystical
prophecies of the Merlin of the district.

It is for him to unfold the little germs of after-history, that he
treasured up in the kernels of such documents as he order addressed to
the county sheriff, to commit to prison those who refused to attend the
services of the established church; to trace the growth of the spirit
among the people, that opened the city gates to the army of the
"Parliament," fortified its castle against royalist soldiers, and turned
its market-place into a place of execution for fellow-citizens, who dared
to espouse the cause of their king; to rescue from oblivion the gems that
were buried beneath the blows of the zealous puritan's demolishing
hammer; to read in the nailed horseshoes, that surmount the doorways of
hundreds of its cottages, as a talisman against witchcraft, the legacy of
superstition bequeathed to their descendants by these earnest
"abolitionists;" to mark the _rise_ and _progress_ of the unfranchised
masses in this age of enlightened liberalism, and the deepening and
mellowed tone of the "voice of the people," as it rises from the
chastened and self-disciplined homes of the educated and thriving
artisans. Upon him too, it devolves, to mark the age and the man--to see
the monuments of the great-hearted and liberal-minded of the days gone
by, in the hospit