Guiana, in the larger sense of the word, is that portion of the South American continent bounded on the north and north-east by the ocean; on the south, south-west and west by the river Amazon, its tributary the Rio Negro, the river Cassiquiare, which unites the river Negro to the river Orinoco, and by the river Orinoco itself. It is thus an island; as there is no break in the water-line that surrounds it. This larger Guiana is, however, divided into two distinct portions, separated from one another by a series of mountain ranges stretching from the Orinoco to the river Oyapok. That portion, which lies between these mountain ranges and the sea, differs entirely in character from the Guiana of the watersheds of the Amazon and Orinoco. It consists of a succession of tablelands, rising one above the other, and is watered by a large number of nearly parallel rivers, whose cataracts and frequent rapids render navigation into the interior, except by canoes, practically impossible. In this Guiana, the Guiana with which this paper deals, there have never been any Spanish or Portuguese settlements. At the end of the sixteenth century no attempt had been made by the Spaniards to cross the river Orinoco, or by the Portuguese, to reach the mouth of the river Amazon. Between these two rivers lay a terra incognita, of which nothing was known, until the publication of Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana in 1595.

Students of the history of the communities now established in a great Republic and a great Dominion on the northern continent of America have this advantage: that they can begin at the beginning of things, at a definite point or from a line drawn, so to say, in the open plain in the light of the full day. There is for them no search for the head-springs of the river in almost impenetrable fastnesses, no dim twilight before the dawn, no doubtful region of myth or tradition or biassed chronicle. A plain tale of truth and fact is there for their perusal from the first. And I suppose in the case of no one of the States which has a beginning before the Declaration of Independence is this more conspicuous than in the case of the last of them formed from overseas, Georgia, the subject of the present essay. The authentic materials are ready to hand in the Public Record Office in abundance: in State papers, in entry books of letters, in books of appointments and grants to settlers, in journals of trustees, in minutes of the Common Council, in proceedings of the president and assistants for the town and county of Savannah from 1741 onwards, and in a mass of original correspondence, memorials and the like.

The word “Wardrobe” has associations for the modern The Wardrobe. historian which he will find very misleading if he takes them back to the end of the thirteenth century. Even at the beginning of the reign of Edward I, the Wardrobe included all the Household departments (i.e. those called in modern times by the names of the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain, and the Master of the Horse), and besides these the Household troops, and something more or less corresponding to the Army Clothing Department. Towards the end of the reign, when everything was on a war footing, it comprised the War Office and the Admiralty as well. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that it included all the spending departments except the Office of Works. It thus controlled a very large number of sub-departments, some of which acquired administrative independence in the following reign, in the Treasurership of Walter de Stapledon.

The middle of the fourteenth century, not only in Italy but throughout Europe, marked a period of crisis and of momentary retrogression.

The portraits in our national collection may be studied in many different ways. They may be treated as examples of Art, as illustrations of the life of some period of British history or as representations of some particular class of men. It seemed to me that a society composed of students of history might be specially interested in the portraits of historical writers. The men of a particular time have a certain resemblance to each other—there is a family likeness in the faces of the Tudor or the Stuart worthies. Soldiers and sailors, lawyers and divines, even when they belong to different periods, seem to possess some common characteristics in feature and expression which a psychologist could trace and define. But the historical writers seem to have no typical or distinctive traits. Nothing in their looks reveals common interests or common pursuits, except that some of them have a bookish air. No doubt the reason is that many of them were politicians or men of action, not merely writers by profession, and it is to our advantage that it was so.

It would be impossible, even if it were desirable, within the limits of this essay, to give a detailed account or even an adequate summary of the causes of the outbreak of the Second Civil War ; but I may be permitted to dwell briefly upon the military conditions under which the crisis was to be met.