fordshire family, bringing to a long familiarity with the history of his native county discriminative research, fresh accession of materials, and a peculiar aptitude for his task, took up the work of Duncumb where he left it, and by the year 1866 had continued it as far as p. 404, so bringing the second volume to a close at the end of the parishes of Linton and Lea, and inviting in a postscript assistance in the completion of this parochial history.' Of that instalment of continuation it may suffice to say that, while the parishes in question are traced to their Anglo-Saxon names and Domesday form, the various manors and lands of 'ancient demesne' are followed up by the aid of rolls and records to their earliest historic owners; and thus, for example, in connection with Linton and Eccleswell, light is thrown on the early association with Herefordshire and the Welsh border of a family for more than three centuries renowned in the military annals of England-the Talbots, whose earlier title of Barons of Eccleswell and Linton became merged, through the services of the great Lord Talbot in the wars with France, in the higher distinction of Earls of Shrewsbury. In text and notes almost every page concerning these is full of research, as various as erudite; and this no less when the annals of the Talbots are being evolved than when the editor discusses the Matthewses of Burton and Belmont, a prominent Herefordshire family since the middle of the eighteenth century, or the Colchesters of Lea and the Wilderness; one of whom, a dispossessed Cavalier, set matters straight by running away with the daughter of the Roundhead successor to his patrimony, Serjeant Maynard; whilst another, the offspring of that union, Colonel Maynard Colchester, was one of that interesting group of laymen who founded and supported the Societies for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts.' But County History, thoroughly executed, is a tedious process, the more so in proportion to the strict verification of evidence, and it would have been no marvel if, scantily assisted save by good words and vague promises, Mr. Cooke's third volume delayed its coming. But, as has been seen above, the sheets of the first parish within its scope, Much Marcle in Greytree Hundred, have been some months printed, and are in the hands of its author's literary friends. Having had the privilege of perusing them, we have shown, in reference to the outbreak and attempted suppression of Lollardism in Herefordshire, how the annals of the Wallwyns of Hellens or Helions in Much Marcle throw a light thereupon; and the earlier pages of its parochial and manorial history, beginning with the identification of Marcle with the A.-S. frontier district-field' (called Much in Herefordshire, as it would be Michel* in Gloucestershire or Monmouthshire, to distinguish it from Little Marcle), introduce us to the powerful Norman family of the De Baluns, who held the manor after Roger de Lacy's banishment by William Rufus, until in 1292 a decision of the Judges in circuit at Hereford affirmed it the dower of Isolda, the widow of Walter de Balun and daughter of Sir Edmund Mortimer, whose second husband, Hugh de Audley, obtained in 1301 a grant in fee to himself, his wife, and their issue, of the manor of Great Marcle. Isolda bare her second husband two sons, gallant soldiers like their father, the younger of whom, Sir James, accompanied the royal army to Gascony in 1325, and to Scotland in 1327; while the elder, Sir Hugh (No. 2), by marriage with the king's niece, the widow of Piers Gaveston, and sister and co-heiress of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, acquired a large inheritance, which, in spite of his being in disgrace after the battle of Boroughbridge until the death of Edward II., he contrived to retain until in Edward III.'s reign he was created Earl of Gloucester, and did distinguished service to his sovereign, both civil and military, being a marshal of the royal army in France in 1340, and ambassador to the French Court in 1342. As he had no male issue, his earldom became extinct in 1347, and the Barony of Audley descended to his only child, Margaret, the wife of Robert Lord Stafford, who was created Earl of Stafford in 1351. Their son, the second Earl, held a command at Crecy, and was succeeded by his three sons, one after another; the fifth Earl, who was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, selling his manor of Marcle Audley to Thomas Wallwyn of Hellens, of whom mention has been made above. In this parish, too, was Yatton, the patrimony of Sir Peter De la Mere, M.P. for the county, and the earliest financial reformer, who, Stowe informs us, was imprisoned for opposing the large subsidies applied for by the Crown and for speaking strongly of the King's mistress. His niece and heiress conveyed her estates to her husband, Sir William St. Mawr, of Wowndy, the ancestor of the Dukes of Somerset. Thus much may suffice for a sample of the active research brought by Mr. Cooke to bear on the history of the early owners of Marcle manor; and in tracing the history of the severances alienated from it by the De Baluns, he introduces us to the family of Kyrle, whose founder obtained a grant from the Crown of Marcle Magna manor in the reign of Elizabeth, and * Cf. Micheldean, Micheltroy. whose whose present representative is Colonel Money Kyrle of Homme House. So far, moreover, is Mr. Cooke from being wholly given to genealogies, that in his notice, à propos of Marcle, of the Kynaston township, he gives a detailed account of the famous landslip known as the 'Wonder' in the reign of Elizabeth, which, after being celebrated by chroniclers and poets from Camden to Fuller and from Drayton to Philips, has found its true geological explanation in Murchison's 'Siluria,' vol. i. pp. 434–6. The earnest of Much Marcle' now before us inspires confident hope of yet more valuable labours on Mr. Cooke's part, upon the remaining parishes of the hundred, which includes among others Mordiford, Walford, Weston-under-Penyard, and Woolhope. And although nine hundreds are yet to follow, a calculation shows us that with the Greytree Hundred a fourth part, in round numbers, of the county will have been dealt with. For exceptional parts and parishes, as well as periods, good service has been done in such volumes as Townsend's 'Leominster,' Robinson's illustrated Herefordshire Castles, Manors, and Mansions,' and the 'Transactions of the Woolhope Club,' which include a certain amount of topography and archæology in their natural history rambles. In estimating the value of the first and second of these, it must be remembered that the writers approached their task not as natives, but as sojourners. The learned author of the Military Memoir of Colonel Birch,' whose posthumous work on the history of the Herefordshire border, edited by his most worthy son and successor, is at the present time in the press,* had become naturalized in the county, and is entitled to the credit of a yet deeper and more comprehensive insight; and Mr. Prebendary Havergal's 'Fasti Herefordenses' supply the necessary data for the cathedral and the ecclesiastical history of Hereford. Adding these sources of suggestive help to older and longer-amassed materials, and looking to the fact of an acute and practical steersman at the helm, shall it be said that 'Herefordshire in the nineteenth century' shrinks from the endeavour, which Mr. Cooke has shown to be feasible, of completing its county history? Quite lately the county of Lincoln has been issuing, in full conviction of assured purpose, elaborate proposals for a similar local work; and we have yet to learn that, did they gird themselves to their task, the county which borrowed from Lincoln diocese its earliest map-maker, whose Mappa Mundi '† is a famous heritage of Hereford Cathedral, would 'Memorials of the Civil War between Charles I. and the Parliament as it affected Herefordshire and the adjacent Counties.' In 2 vols. Longman & Co., 1879. †The author of the 'Mappa Mundi,' Richard de Bello, was Prebendary of Lafford would allow itself to be distanced in the race by another only just proposing to take the field. The Woolhope Club has spread its reputation beyond the range of its county or even of the British Isles by its mycological researches. It bids fair to win again a kindred pre-eminence by its new Pomona. Surely if a band of good men and true, gifted with health and spirit, industry and research, would answer to the call of the late Mr. Duncumb's highly qualified successor, and assist him by due search for materials, and division of the work of discriminating them, in the chivalrously undertaken task of completing this county history, it would be the most solid evidence of their recognition of the debt they owe to their beautiful, winsome, and historic county, 'Spartam quam nacti sunt, ornare.' IN ART. VI.-1. Polybius. Ed. Duebner. Paris, 1865. N the centuries when the knowledge of the classical writings slumbered, the tradition of ancient politics was summed up in the memory of the Roman Cæsar. The idea of law and order concentrated in the person of a universal monarch, and sanctified by the name of Rome, had impressed itself deeply on the imagination of the world; and this idea meets us throughout the middle ages, crossing the turbulent freedom of barbaric tribes and the license of petty local rulers, and surviving amidst all the changing forms which conquest and migration gave to the actual structure of medieval society. Cæsarism and its works alone remained of all the institutions of antiquity, to tell the younger nations of the political life of their predecessors. That such should be the result of the ancient system, and such the last word which it was destined to leave to posterity, would have seemed a grievous failure and disappointment to the statesmen and philosophers of Greece and Rome. For them the free self-governed Republic is the home of civilisation and the indispensable condition of political life. The City, not the Empire, is the subject of the ideal politics of Aristotle and Plato. The civic Republic is the cause for which Demosthenes and Cicero struggled in vain, and the object of the pathetic regrets of Tacitus. How are we to account for this fantastic dissimilarity of parent and offspring? How was it that the liberty of the ancient world brought forth bondage? Lafford in Lincoln Cathedral in 1283. His connexion with Bishop Swinfield of Hereford was as early as 1289. He became Prebendary of Norton in Hereford Cathedral in 1305. He left his Map to the Cathedral Church of Hereford. The The doctrine of self-governing freedom and rational obedience to law, first worked out and systematized in these ancient Republics, is a great step in advance in the domain of politics, then and there achieved by the human race. But the advantage gained was limited by the impossible requirements, which the ancient world attached to the conception of political freedom. Liberty staked its existence on the success of one particular form of its manifestation, and, when this form became obsolete, liberty itself suffered an eclipse of centuries. The shock of great events disturbed the conditions under which alone healthy civic Republics could exist. The conquests of Alexander began, and the conquests of Rome completed the destruction of freedom, except in the narrow circle of a single Republic: that Republic found itself incapable of combining self-government and empire: and so we pass into an age, in which the world is compelled to turn away its eyes from the higher gifts of political life and energy, and has to content itself with the material prosperity, the shallow though wide-spread culture, the mediocre abilities, and the passive virtues, which alone can find a place under the cold shade of a despotism.† Disappointing as is the result, and disheartening as is the spectacle of brilliant hopes and grand aspirations frustrated, and mighty possibilities dwarfed or become abortive, still there is hardly any topic suggested by ancient history more interesting and more instructive than that of the failure of the earliest form of the free State. One of the most important epochs, in this process of transition from civic Republicanism to universal monarchy, is the period of the absorption of Greece into the Roman Empire; and of this period we happily possess an accurate and interesting account, preserved to us in the works of the contemporary historian Polybius. It is the purpose of this article to present a picture, drawn for the most part after Polybius, of the two great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, in this time of struggle and transition. We must first say a few words concerning the historian who is to be our guide. The person of Polybius, like his book, occupies a middle place between the Greek world of independent states, and the Roman world of subjects dominated by the Sovereign Republic. In his boyhood he was the pupil of Philopœmen, 'the last of the Greeks;' in his later life the chosen friend of Scipio Emilianus, the destroyer of Carthage. In early manhood a magistrate of the Achæan League, then for long years a prisoner in Italy, Polybius found himself at last in the position * Ο δυνάμενος ἄρχειν καὶ ἄρχεσθαι is Aristotle's definition of the citizen. 'In quantum præumbrante Imperatoris fastigio datur,' Tac. Ann. xiv. 47. of |