Excerpt from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 19: New Series IT has been my practice on former occasions, when I have had the honour of addressing you from this chair, to review briefly the noteworthy events of the past year, and to conclude with some general remarks on matters that seemed likely to be of interest to the Society. I may be allowed to follow the same plan to-day. The life of corporations like ours, societies which aim at maintaining and promoting a particular branch of learning, is not likely to be eventful. Our doings are of little interest to any outside our own body: to the great mass of the public they are practically unknown. We may have our phases of comparative activity or lethargy, our ups and downs of pro sperity or decadence; we may even pass through internal storms and crises, which produce an effect on our subsequent history for good or ill. But for the most part we pursue the modest and even tenor of our way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.