How sad was the lot of Nathaniel Salmon, who printed his history in 1728. Conscience, which makes cowards of some men, constrained him to surrender a modest stipend in the Church and live penuriously by the scrapings and scratchings of his quill pen. So poverty-stricken was this author that he could not even afford an index. Now it is an unpardonable crime to print a history without an index nominum (hanging is too easy, the felon should be drawn and quartered) yet should no lover of Hertfordshire on that account neglect this book. Salmon has a tender regard for the groundling people - those who have "no memorial." He displays a "pleasant curiosity" concerning fish and fishing; and he loves to sit and moralise in the shade of, what he oddly calls, those "glorious vegetables," the oaks and elms and walnut-trees of Hertfordshire. It must have been hard for this lover of nature to die of starvation in a London garret, but better writing-men than he have done the same.

A polite bow to our predecessors  by Reginald Hine.