Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/628

 6 1 8 Reviews of Books negotiations, it enables him more clearly to set forth their deeper causes and results; and it is in this luminous exposition of the broader bear- ings of diplomacy that the lasting worth of Dr. Hill's work is likely to be found. Not that his study has lacked minuteness. His reading has been singularly broad and thorough, and the bibliographies appended to his chapters form a most useful introduction to the vast and multiplying literature of his subject. Few titles of serious importance are wanting, and there is seldom a slip in the description. If he nowhere indulges in polemics, his carefully worded verdicts show a clear sense of the controversies still unsettled; and his dicta, though often open to dissent, do not transcend the fair limits of opinion. The field in which he shows himself least sure-footed is that of historical geography. Ducal Bur- gundy and Franche-Comte more than once change places (pp. 134, 297, 300), and it must be Franche-Comte of which he is thinking when he calls (p. 383) the Duchy of Burgundy " so important in securing a safe frontier to France ". The Swiss cantons are sometimes miscounted (pp. 108, 287). The Austrian lands pawned to Charles the Bold did not connect the separated parts of his domain or even lie between them, and the Breisgau is not in Elsass (p. 108). The Ortenau should not lose its article and be coupled with Hagenau, as if it were a town instead of a district ; and it might have been well to make it clear, too, that by Hagenau the Landvogtei is meant (pp. 326, 329). To speak (p. 358) of Charles V.'s " lands on the Upper Rhine, Elsass, and Wiir- temberg" is to imply that Elsass is not on the Upper Rhine or that Wurtemberg is. The proximity of the Palatinate to France and the Netherlands (p. 556) was hardly such as to help explain its Calvinism: neither approached it closely, and there were nearer refuges for the exiles of both. Nor can he be unquestionably followed in his other excursions out- side the realm of diplomacy. Once he essays a description of a battle (p. 127) : " An avalanche of thirty-five thousand mountaineers, armed with terrible pikes and powerful crossbows, swept down the steep slopes " upon the " sixty thousand Burgundian soldiers " " concentrated . . . between the deep Lake of Morat and the mountain-wall that rises above it." But the Lake of Morat is not a deep one, there is no moun- tain-wall in the neighborhood, and the Swiss had first to dislodge a Burgundian force from the plateau before they could sweep down (not, so far as is known, "concealed and protected by the foliage") the gentle hill-slope to the lake. As to their numbers and their weapons let his military critics dispute. Students of the Reformation, too, will be puzzled by his conception of " Zwingli's idea of congregational self- government " (pp. 424, 434), and will hardly accept unqualified his sen- tences as to the Protest and its Diet. They may even be tempted to smile at seeing Denif^e's assault on Luther as a theologian and as a man cited as an authority on his political significance. But slips such as