"Genealogical enquiries and local topography, so far from being unworthy the attention of the philosophical enquirer, are amongst the best materials which he can use, and the fortunes and changes of one family, or the events of one upland township, may explain the darkest and most dubious portions of the annals of a realm."-PALGRAVE. "The expansion and extension of genealogical study is a very remarkable feature of our own times. Men are apparently awaking to the fact that there are other families besides those described in the peerage, that those families have their records, played their part in history, furnished the bone and sinew of national action, and left traces behind them which it behoves their descendants to search out and keep in remembrance. There is nothing in this that need be stigmatised as vain and foolish; it is a very natural instinct, and it appears to me to be one of the ways in which a general interest in national history may be expected to grow."-STUBBS. "Let no one deem that, because a false pedigree is a thing to be eschewed and scouted, therefore a true pedigree is a thing to be despised. A true pedigree, be it long or short, is a fact. To those to whom it belongs it is a possession; and, like any other possession, it is to be respected. It is only the false imitation of the true which is to be despised."-FREEMAN. "Falsum committunt viri docti, qui hominibus de plebe nobilitatem, insignia et antiquitatem generis adfingunt. Et potest profecto debetque mercenariorum illorum pœna tunc, quum reipublicæ valde per eos nocitum, atque fides monumentorum et historiæ turbata est, ad ultimum supplicium proferri."LEYSER. |