Note 4 — PREFACE.

The signatures of Magna Charta evince that the nobility of those times, like Pierrot in the farce, were “un peu brouillés avec l’Alphabet;” but the spirit which founded that great arch of British freedom, was well worth all the namby-pamby acquirements of all the modern nobles who ever presided over archæology, (or, as Walpole calls it, “old woman’s logic,”) flirted with the muses, and combined to give tracts to England, or rose-trees to the starving peasantry of Connaught and Munster.