I. to Edward IV., exist there, without calendar or index; and in such masses as to defy the patience of any inquirer, however ardent.  It need not be said that in such a variety of documents their value must vary considerably, or that many of them are of little use; but each of them is at least worthy of being examined; and there are few of them which, if properly scrutinized by apt labourers, would not at least contribute to the elucidation or ratification of some branch of history.  Some of them would render still more important services; and, by pointing out the daily habits and most familiar occurrences of the lives of our kings and other eminent personages who figure in our history, lead us to a much more accurate estimate of their genius than any that has hitherto been formed.  With this view, the close rolls are amongst the most minute and interesting of those documents which remain unexplored.  The character of King John has had but scanty justice done to it; and perhaps those who have formed their notions of that monarch from the ordinary accounts of him, will be surprised to find him writing to the Abbot of Reading to acknowledge the receipt of “six volumes of books, containing the whole of the Old Testament, Master Hugh de St. Victor’s treatise on the Sacraments, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the Epistles of St. Augustine on the City of God, and on the 3rd part of the Psalter, Valerian de Moribus, Origen’s treatise on the Old Testament, and Candidus Arianus to Marius;”—­and that on another occasion shortly afterwards he acknowledges the receipt of “his copy of Pliny,” which had been in the custody of the same Abbot.  Still less does it consist with the commonly adopted notions of his selfish tyranny, that he should address Bryan de Insula in terms like the following:  “Know that we are quite willing that our chief barons, concerning whom you wrote to us, may hunt while passing through your bailiwick, provided that you know who they are and what they take; for we do not keep our forests, nor our beasts, for our own use only, but for the use also of our faithful subjects.  See, however, that they are well guarded on account of robbers, for the beasts are more frightened by robbers than by the aforesaid barons.”  Of the reign of Henry III. the particulars are still more minute.  Notwithstanding its connexion with superstitions which exist no longer, we may sympathize with the pious charity that suggested that monarch’s order “for feeding as many poor persons as can enter the greater and lesser hall at Westminster on Friday next after the octaves of St. Matthew, being the anniversary of Eleanor, the King’s sister, formerly Queen of Scotland, for the good of the said Eleanor’s soul.”  His taste for the fine arts, and his encouragement of its professors, are frequently to be traced in the entries upon these rolls.  In one of them he gives directions for having the great chamber at Westminster painted with a good green colour after the fashion of a curtain; and in the great