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 the North Sea to the shores of Flanders and Holland, was as completely under the dominion of the King of England as Kent or Yorkshire. To fish in those waters, or even to navigate them without his permission, was an encroachment on his rights.' 'Monstrous' as the claim was, says Mr. Gardiner, its appeal to the English contempt of foreigners was too strong to be without an echo in the hearts of Englishmen. The preposterousness of the claim, when it is viewed in all the length and breadth of its extremest pretensions, may be admitted as freely and denounced as severely as it has been by the most accurate and dispassionate of the historians of the England of the seventeenth century. But a claim which has attached to it a considerable history and a vast body of thought and writing, antecedent, contemporary and subsequent, and which engaged the minds of two of the most erudite authors of that time, by whatsoever motive they were impelled to write, cannot be dismissed as unworthy of serious and even exacting study. The purport of the leading works in the history of