The  British  Museum  contains  many  hundreds
of  unpublished  manuscripts  bearing  upon  the  sub-
ject— copies  of  official  documents,  letters,  and
"  relations  "  from  Philip's  Court,  petitions  and
statements  of  o-rievance  aclclressed  to  the  King,
and  vast  collections  of  miscellaneous  papers  in
Spanish,  Portuguese,  and  French,  most  of  which
have  not  yet  been  consulted  for  historical  purposes.
Amongst  a  great  mass  of  rather  dry  official  docu-
ments of  the  period,  most  of  them  copies,  I  recently


326  A    SPRIG   OF

came  across  a  small,  compact  group  of  papers,  all
originals,  telling  a  curious,  plaintive  little  story,
nakedly  enough,  it  is  true,  but  not  without  a  pathos
of  its  own.  There  is  nothing  historically  important
in  it,  or  in  the  fact  that  it  discloses  probably  for  the
first  time  since  it  happened,  but  a  quaint  side-light
is  thrown  by  some  of  the  documents  on  the  way
in  which  Court  intrigue  was  conducted,  and  also,
curiously  enough,  on  the  opinion  of  the  highest
authorities  of  those  times  as  to  the  best  way  of
bringing  up  a  child,  by  which  it  will  be  seen  that,
allowing  for  difference  of  climate  and  national
habits,  no  great  change  has  taken  place  in  this
respect  in  the  two  centuries  and  a  half  that  have
passed  since  the  papers  were  penned.
