The great West., 1891-12-18
SOME LOST DOCUMENTS.
ANTIQUE WORKS WHOLLY OR
PARTLY DESTROYED.
eortia Was Widow With q Grown Son
Did Oliver Cromwell Appoint
His Son to Be His Successor
"A Great Man.

0~-1
IA Great Man.
1t is very true that the most famous
books Of antiquity have come down to
US more or less imperfect as rule
says the Sat Evening Post Their
popularity caused many copies to be
made and 80 they had a great advan-
tage in the struggle for existence.
Yet, in regard to this it is strange
that Tacitus has suffered beyond all
Others when. by special decree each
public library in the Roman empire
was bound to have copy OF his his
tory, and ten transcriptons were made
every year at the charge of the state.
One alone out of these thousands sur
vived, and. as every schoolboy knows
in practice. less than a sixth part
could be deciphered But though the
writings of popular authors have in
measure been preserved. some of US
would exchange an enormous quantity
OF the bulk for q selection of
those less fashionable books which
we know only by tantalizing
glimpses. What treasure would
be the History of the Etruscans by
the Emperor Claudius! Or the Anti
Cato written by Julius Caesar. to
prove tlat the hero of Utica was not
such noble fellow after all. Suetonius
refers continually to the published
letters of Augustus and Tiberlus and
to Memoirs, more or less complete,
which some of the Twelve Caesars had
written. 1t has been laboriously cal
culated that Plutarch quotes Psi
books; of more than eighty of them
we know nothing further They were
of the class too, which we can least
spare. Plutarch himself wrote four
teen lives that have perished, those of
Epaminondas the two Scipios, Hesiod,
Pindar, Leonidas Metullus, Gratis
Aristomanet and the first five Caesars
NOT to mention Hercules. Incident
ally he alludes to the memoirs of Ara
tus, Sylla, Pyrrhus, to history of the
Marsi by Lucullus and to a work in
defense of Brutus, by his step-sen.
Bibulus- sentimental persons may be
rather shocked to hear that Pcrtia
was widow with grown up son. at
the time of the conspiracy. These
books were all eXtant in Plutarch's
day. To heather barbarism we owe
the most of such losses and amazing
it is that any fragment of a more en-
lightened age survived after an ignor-
ant priesthood and brutal laity had
been wilfully destroying them for
more than thousand years.
The lost documents of English his
tory are curious rather than impor-
tant SO far as is known. Isaac Dis
raeli made collection of them, If one
may so speak, for his 'Curiosities of
Literature. 1t is not a long nor
very saddening list if regarded dis
passionately. We find continual rea-
son to lament that such and such
record has vanished, but literature did
not exist until date when its produc-
tions were fairly well protected by the
printing press Our gravest loss prob
ably is that OF the I'D ballads and
songs, which never were Transcribed /
But there is an exception of the most
painful class. Very nearly all records
dealing with the private life of Oliver
Cromwell, and even with transactions
not inseparable from the councils of
the state, have vanished. Most of
them were wilfully destroyed in the
savage stupid, yet most Ineligible,
triumph of the exiles. This we know
by evidence beyond question. To cite
one case there is an entry in the Reg
lister of Graces at Cambridge, under
the date 1861, ordering that what
sover mandates of Missions
can be found sent by the late
Chancellor Oliver Cromwell shall be
burnt. Richard Ormston, steward
of Sir Arthur Hazelrig at Newcastle
upon-Tyne, begged four of Cromwell's
letters when his correspondence with
Hazelrig was burnt at Naseby Hall;
one of those so happily rescued was
that referring to the Scotch prisoners
taken at Dunbar:-'I pray you let hui
manity be exercised towards them. I
am persuaded it will be comely." In
the sad and shameful dearth of evil
dence regarding the character of the
greatest man in the island story this
hint is priceless. A lost document of
the EXTREMIST Importance was that
which nominated divers successor.
He wrote it year before his death,
sealed it carefully, and deposited it at
Hampton court with the knowledge
of all about him; but it does not ap-
pear that he ever named the contents
to any. When the hero lay dying and
speechless, this paper was sought-in
vain 1t is not at all certain that the
protector appointed his eldest son.
They took his inarticulate utterances
for consent when Whitelock suggested
Richard. That the formal instrument
deposited at Hampton court was stolen
can hardly be doubted; and we may
we'll suspect under all the circum-
stances that someone who had an op-
portunity made away with it because
it did not nominate Richard So, per-
naps. the history Of England was
changed.
The Color Of Things.