It has been thought desirable by some of the leading members of our Council that I should avail myself of the opportunity offered by this second Edition of the Select Letters of Columbus, to lay before the Society a correspondence in which I have endeavoured to vindicate the character of the Society's early productions, and especially the first edition of this work, from a most unjustifiable attack made upon them by Mr. Froude in the Westminster Review in 1852, and repeated in the second volume of that gentleman's Short Studies on Great Subjects, printed in 1867, and reprinted in a popular edition in the same year. The letters themselves will convey to the reader the whole of the facts, minus only the bitterness and ferocity of Mr. Froude's attack.

The Athenceum, July 18th, 1867.

“British Museum, July 3rd, 1867.

“Will you allow me to appeal against a wrong done to the Hakluyt Society in general, and to myself in particular, in a work now very extensively read?

“In the second volume of Mr. Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects, at page 102, is an article on ‘England's Forgotten Worthies,’ in which the author makes an attack on the Hakluyt Society, the bitter expressions of which need not be repeated here. It is headed by the titles of three of the Society's early publications, and the first he states to be The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the South Sea in 1593.