It is pleasant to be able to record that the year which has passed since our last anniversary meeting has seen our Society make satisfactory progress in all respects. Our numbers have increased. Our losses by death have been nine, and by resignation nine, and four names have been removed from our roll for non-payment of subscription. On the other hand, forty-two new Fellows have been elected, among them some whom we have special reason to welcome, so that we have a net increase in subscribing and life Fellows of twenty, a far larger number than usual. We must, each one of us, do our best to keep up this rate of increase, remembering always the responsibility resting on the proposer and seconder of a candidate not to lay before the Council the name of anyone who will not be a credit to the Society. Our list of subscribing Libraries, British, colonial, and foreign, shows a net increase of eight, and a total of about 200. This we owe to the energy and influence of our Hon. Treasurer, though we certainly give Libraries a generous return for their subscriptions. We have to thank Mr. Tedder also for his skilful management of our finances, which, as you may see by the Report of the Council, are in a healthy condition. The average attendance at our meetings has been good; our Library has received munificent gifts, and our publications have been issued with even more than usual promptitude. We are much indebted to our Director and to our Hon. Secretary for the time and labour which they—both of them busy men—devote to the furtherance of our interests.

Ballads are useful as a supplement to graver historical authorities, and throw a light upon the history of the past which we could not derive from other sources. It is generally not difficult to know what the great men of any day—the nobles, and statesmen, and men of letters—thought about the events which happened in their time. We have their letters, or their speeches, or their biographies; but it is difficult to know what the common people who formed the mass of the nation thought, and it is important to know this too. Here the ballads help us, because they were the literature of the populace, composed by men of the people for the people, reflecting popular feeling and helping to shape it. We may divide them roughly into three classes: firstly, there are the long narrative ballads which embody either traditional accounts of some past event or popular versions of some recent event, and show us what people believed to have happened; secondly, there is another class of ballads which express the feelings of the moment about the events of the day, and set forth the joy or sorrow of the people about something which was happening at the time. These are often satirical in their tone, and not easy to distinguish from the regular satirical poems of the period composed by professional writers.

In my previous paper I brought the story of Caesar down to the year when he returned home from the East after Sulla's death, and started a new double career—first as one of the college of pontiffs, and secondly as a tribune; the fact of his having had both a religious and secular status at this time no doubt greatly extended his influence and increased the number of useful people with whom he had personal ties. His appointment as a pontiff on the death of his maternal uncle was due, no doubt, to the antecedents of his mother's family, whose ancestral connection with priestly functions he inherited. The Aurelian ‘gens,’ which was plebeian in status, according to Festus professed to derive their family name from their sacerdotal duties, and particularly from the worship of the sun, which in the Sabine language was called ‘ausel,’ a word related to the ‘ozul’ of the Salian hymns and the Etruscan ‘Uzil,’ the god of light Festus argues that the Aurelii were at first called Auselii, like the Valerii and Papinii were respectively called Valesii and Papisii. It further seems to follow from these facts that Caesar, on his mother's side, belonged to a Sabine stock.

In one of his greatest novels Balzac describes the sudden accession to fortune of César Birotteau, the hairdresser, and his lamentable fall, due to overweening confidence and neglect of the business to which he owed his elevation. It is the tragedy of the man who rests too long upon his laurels, and has failed to learn life's lesson, that a breathing space to prepare for further effort is the only rest possible for one who would not slip back in the struggle. Such tragedies are common, though it requires a Balzac, a Shakespeare, or an Æschylus to make them manifest. Sometimes, however, they may be dimly perceived in the utterances of the victims, themselves barely conscious of the significance of the facts which they relate.

The diary which is the subject of this paper was written by Margaret, Lady Hoby, the wife of Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, of Hackness, near Scarborough; it extends from August 1599 to August 1605. The manuscript is now in the British Museum (Egerton 2614); it was purchased from the Sydenham family, to whom it descended through Hoby's heir, Sir John Sydenham. As I hope to edit the text in full, I propose to give only a brief account of the writer, and a few extracts from the diary showing the everyday life of a country gentlewoman of that time.

The manuscripts of which this Paper contains an account have an interesting history. Their publication was intended sixty years ago. Unfortunately, this was never carried out, the manuscripts finding their way instead, in 1870, to the British Museum, where, under the title of the ‘Egerton MS. 2124,’ they have lain ever since more or less undisturbed.

When I was invited to read a paper on Indian history at a meeting of the Royal Historical Society I felt not only honoured by the request, but also gratified to learn that the Society intended to bring within its scope the encouragement of the study of the history of our Indian Empire, an empire whose progress and growth is a wondrous fact in the history of the world. The history of the Hindu kingdoms and the history of the government of the Mahomedans should be the special province of the Royal Asiatic Society, for no Englishman can deal with them in a satisfactory manner without a knowledge of the classical languages of the East. He must study and compare the original historians of India. The systematic study of the history of British dominion in India must be the most effectual agency in removing that ignorance (so strange and so discreditable) which prevails among all classes in England regarding the history of our Indian Empire. The responsibility for a just, impartial and stable government of India has been committed for good or evil into the hands of Parliament, and through Parliament to the electoral body of Great Britain; but the electoral body must fail to discharge that great responsibility if the reading multitude remain ignorant of the history of English government in India. It is also the duty and the interest of England that the young men who are sent from our universities to be the main instruments of administering the government of our Indian Empire in all its extensive and complicated branches should be trained to pursue the study of history in a scientific spirit, so that they may be able to apply scientific methods of inquiry to an examination in detail of the development of our administration in India. Many years spent in examining the musty documents in the Indian archives has brought home to me the value of the light which history may shed on practical problems. In India there is no problem which is old, there is no problem which is new. Measures which were supposed to be new would never have been passed if they had been studied by the dry light of history. In the Record Office under his charge the Indian civilian will generally find some material which will reward the labour of research.

The Peace of Paris is a signpost in the vast realm of possibility pointing out the paths over which the great powers of to-day have travelled. It stands at the crossways. Here the ancient kingdoms of the East met the new world in the West. The fates of Indian princes and redskin chiefs were alike decided by the white man at Fontainebleau. Their civilisations and religions alike were doomed when their lands passed under the suzerainty of his Most Gracious Majesty George III. Those who met at the signpost in 1762, and those who travel back to it along paths half obscured by the growth of two centuries, agree that it is no ordinary landmark. Contemporaries differed in their estimation of the peace, but they all agreed as to its importance. It was the great political question which agitated the courts of London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg from the beginning of 1761 till December 1762, when the preliminaries of the peace were approved in the House of Commons by the huge majority of 319 to 65. George III. spoke of the peace as glorious. Charles Townsend praised it. Hans Stanley, one of the few good English diplomatists of the eighteenth century, defended it ably in the House. Pitt alone opposed it with any force. His speech, though familiar as a burst of oratory, has long been an enigma when treated as an historical document. Why did the great War Minister so absolutely condemn the peace which laid the foundations of the British Empire, the peace which is generally regarded as the result of his own successful policy?