Archives Of the past: just as no one can have a really sound knowledge of Elizabethan handwritings who has not come to them through the medieval ones out of which they were deve loped. There is, I believe, only one series of modern Archive questions which could not be answered — and answered best by a properly trained Archivist drawing directly upon his experience with ancient collections that is the series of questions referring to the relative positions Of the Archivist and the Maker of Archives, and to Archive-making generally; in which cases a new point of view is possible because we can here, so to Speak, get at the Archives before they are made.