THE OLD CHARGES OF BRITISH FREEMASONS.
"
At
79
end of two hundred years the Sonna or oral law was fixed and consecrated
Bochari, who discriminated seven thousand two hundred and seventy-five
by
from a mass of three hundred thousand reports of a more doubtful or
genuine traditions,
"
After this feat, the present examination ought not to be regarded as in
spurious cliaracter
Gibbon/
tlie
the labours of
Al
!
any sense
That in some degree the
laborious.
details
appear dry and uninteresting
may
quite possible, although there is authority for the belief that the scrutiny of old
documents is regarded by many persons as a pleasurable occupation.
Indeed, a writer in
I fear is
the " Spectator
"
who had been
trained up in
asserts
"
:
I have heard one of the greatest geniuses this age has produced,
all
the polite studies of Antiquity, assure me, upon his being
obliged to search into several rolls
was
and
records, that, notwithstanding
such an employment
very dry and irksome to him, he at last took an incredible pleasure in it, and
^
I cannot flatter myself that such
preferred it even to the reading of Virgil or Cicero."
a result will follow from a perusal of these pages, but I can at least avow an increasing
at first
love for the inquiry, and a growing interest in the details as they are successively brought
forward for analysis.
"
the " Old Charges according to their texts (tlieir several dates of compilation having been already considered), we shall find that some five divisions wiU be all the
classification that is requisite.
If
we now group
(D)
"HALLIWELL"
As this MS. dates shortly after
(1st November 1388), and also those
MS. (No.
the order of Eichard
1).
II.
^
for returns
from the guilds
of the crafts (or "Mysteries ") I am strongly of opinion,
was, perhaps, copied from a return made in obedience to such an ordinance (as I
once thought probable),* but that as the charters and letters patent were required