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HE remarkable development which of late years has been manifest in biographical undertakings renders it necessary that in adding to the number of those which have been completed, or which are in process of publication, I should prove myself justified in doing so by the distinctive character of my enterprise.

Biography in the present day is tending, like other studies, to become more and more specialized. Already dictionaries of universal biography are being everywhere abandoned for those which are to deal with the biography of particular nations. But even so, the mines of biographical materials have become so much more accessible within the present generation, that such a work, for instance, as the noble Dictionary of National Biography, of which the two volumes have already appeared, seems likely to extend far beyond the limits that could at first sight have appeared possible. It may, therefore, fairly be contended that the more restricted the scope of the biographer, the more creditably his work is likely to be accomplished, and that if he confines himself to a special class, requiring special information he may be enabled, by making himself master of that information, to produce a work of peculiar value.

My own enterprise is accordingly limited to a particular epartment of the wide field open to biographical research. It is my aim to compile from the original records, in a clear form, complete and essentially authentic lists of all those whose names are to be discovered as graduates of our two historic universities, as members of our ancient Inns of Court, or as representatives from the earliest times in the parliaments of the three kingdoms. These lists I propose in addition to annotate to the best of my ability, making use, for that purpose, of the stores of material accumulated in my genealogical collections, and in the case of those now living of a vast mass of that personal information which the biographer so highly values, and which has been long and freely tendered me. It is the lack of such contemporary information in the past that he has so often and so grievously to deplore. It will readily be admitted that such an enterprise as this, if I am enabled to accomplish it with success, will form not only a series of most important works of reference, but will lay the [v]