schoolmaster of Coventry. Once open to the general public, although
then at the close of its first quarter of a century, the _Britannia_
flourished with a new lease of life, and continued to bloom, like a
literary magnolia, all down the seventeenth century. It Is now
as little read as other famous books of uncompromising size. The
bookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception of these heroic
folios, and if we want British antiquities now, we find them in terser
form and more accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in the
writings of later antiquaries. Giant Camden moulders at his cave's
mouth, a huge and reverend form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by.
But his once popular folio was the life work of a particularly
interesting and human person; and without affecting to penetrate to
the darkest corners of the cavern, it may be instructive to stand a
little while on the threshold.

When this first English edition of the _Britannia_ was published,
Camden was one of the most famous of living English writers. For one
man of position who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be twenty,
at least, who were quite familiar with the claims of the Head-master
of Westminster and Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden was in his sixtieth
year, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, violent detraction, and
final triumph. His health was poor, but he continued to write history,
eager, as he says, to show that "though I have been a studious admirer
of venerable antiquity, yet have I not been altogether an incurious
spectator of modern occurrences." He stood easily first among the
historians of his time; he was respected and adored by the Court and
by the Universities, and that his fame might be completed by the
chrism of detraction, his popularity was assured from year to year by
the dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists scattered from their
secret presses. It had not been without a struggle that Camden had