more than there is to-day, for research. For bare facts are not all. Much of what we strive to find out was not and could not be known to those of the period which we study, for it was veiled from them by the life of everyday. They were like travellers in the forest who cannot see the greater conformation of the land for the undergrowth that presses round them too closely on every side. It is our task as researchers to discover not only the facts, the dry minutiæ, but the relations between them, their reactions upon one another, those slower changes and developments to which the most clear-sighted of contemporaries must be ever blind. This knowledge, if we can attain it, is new knowledge, and as well deserves the name of discovery as any secret wrested from nature by the astronomer or physicist.
It is in this sense that those who have planned this Review would use the name of research, in the sense of interpretation of material as well as that of amassing it; for though all honour is due to the laborious compiler of fact upon fact, a view of research which ranges no further than this misses in their opinion all that is best in it and most worthy of effort. This Review will therefore welcome new facts—however disconnected and in themselves seemingly unimportant they may be—but it will welcome no less cordially attempts to weave such facts into a larger unity, to interpret them in the light of their own time and of ours, and to place them in their true relation to the knowledge that we already possess. Its pages will be open to all new matter, to all new interpretation of the old; the one kind of article that it is hoped to exclude is the mere compilation which has nothing fresh to say. ***** But our aim is much more than the mere collection and printing of work already accomplished. English studies have in the past suffered greatly from want of co-ordination. Many of the best researchers have worked in ignorance of what others were doing in the same field, and much time has been wasted by duplication. It is our hope that this Review may serve as a centre for all such workers, that they may report in it what they themselves are doing, seek through its means the aid of others in their difficulties, and by its help be brought into touch with other workers in their own and neighbouring fields.
And then, too, research has suffered much from want of guidance.
