historians have been constructed, has had advantages likely to become more and more apparent as time goes on.  It acts as a check upon the imaginative tendencies which even eminent writers have not always been able, by themselves, to keep under proper control.  The certainty, nay the mere probability, that you will be confronted with the witnesses on whose evidence you profess to have relied—­the ‘sources’ from which your story is derived—­will suggest the necessity of sobriety of statement and the advisability of subordinating rhetoric to veracity.  Had the contemporary documents been available for an immediate appeal to them by the reading public, we should long ago have rid ourselves of some dangerous superstitions.  We should have abandoned our belief in the fictions that the Armada of 1588 was defeated by the weather, and that the great Herbert of Torrington was a lubber, a traitor, and a coward.  It is not easy to calculate the benefit that we should have secured, had the presentation of some important events in the history of our national defence been as accurate as it was effective.  Enormous sums of money have been wasted in trying to make our defensive arrangements square with a conception of history based upon misunderstanding or misinterpretation of facts.  Pecuniary extravagance is bad enough; but there is a greater evil still.  We have been taught to cherish, and we have been reluctant to abandon, a false standard of defence, though adherence to such a standard can be shown to have brought the country within measurable distance of grievous peril.  Captain Duro, of the Spanish Navy, in his ‘Armada Invencible,’ placed within our reach contemporary evidence from the side of the assailants, thereby assisting us to form a judgment on a momentous episode in naval history.  The evidence was completed; some being adduced from the other side, by our fellow-countryman Sir J. K. Laughton, in his ‘Defeat of the Spanish Armada,’ published by the Navy Records Society.  Others have worked on similar lines; and a healthier view of our strategic conditions and needs is more widely held than it was; though it cannot be said to be, even yet, universally prevalent.  Superstition, even the grossest, dies hard.

Something deeper than mere literary interest, therefore, is to be attributed to a work which has recently appeared in Paris.[63] To speak strictly, it should be said that only the first volume of three which will complete it has been published.  It is, however, in the nature of a work of the kind that its separate parts should be virtually independent of each other.  Consequently the volume which we now have may be treated properly as a book by itself.  When completed the work is to contain all the documents relating to the French preparations during the period 1793-1805, for taking the offensive against England (tousles_documents_se_rapportant_ ala_preparation_de_l’offensive_contre_l’A
ngleterre_).  The search for, the critical examination and the methodical