not fully accounted for, is perhaps a difficulty which is not
shared by others. There seems to me to be no key to the paradox
of this apparently undefeatable Crown if it is indeed rightly
presented to us as functioning largely through the inchoate pre-
cedents which will some day furnish a constitution for its remote
successors. Nor do I think that its power can be explained as a
survival of that of the Saxon Crown or as a borrowing from the
reviving study of Roman Law, still less from anything to be
derived from Christian kingship. I may be wrong, but to me it
is a problem, and one which in its own terms has its solution.
However this may be, it is, perhaps, well that the records
should from time to time be read anew, the proportions of our
diagram of the past questioned, and the truth of an age sought in
itself and not by the way of retrospective history. There is
something to be said for leaving a remote age to tell its own
tale and that I have tried to do.

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