Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/363

 Hazlitt : The Venetian Republic 353 an ecclesiastical suit before a secular tribunal "according to the custom of Normandy," No. 1257, but the cartulary of La Couture, No. XVI., records a suit between the same parties before an ecclesiastical tribunal. These cases are mentioned only as illustrations. Almost a complete statement of the judicial usages of feudalism could be made from this volume. The Calendar gives us renewed and conclusive evidence of the close similarity, in fact of the identity, of all the arrangements here coming to notice, public and private, on the two sides of the channel. There was no doubt a real sense in which the two governments were distinct, but there were ways in which they were constantly running together. There seems to have been no difference between curia regis and curia Jiicis, and officers from one country serve without comment in the other. In fact the classes that move and act in these charters, nobles and ecclesi- astics, seem to regard the two countries, for all practical purposes, as one land. Gkorgk Burton An.-iMs. The Venetian Republic : Its Rise, its Groivlh, and its Fall, 42 1 - 1797. By W. C.KEv Hazlitt. (London: Adam and Charles Black; New York: The Macmillan Co. 1900. Two vols., pp. xxvii, 814, xi, 815.) This is the third and final edition of the work which Mr. Hazlitt first published as a sketch in 1858, and republished, much e.xpanded, in 1S60. It would almost be proper to call it a new work, since one of its volumes contains quite as much matter as all the four volumes of i860 contained, and, while much of the substance of the earlier edition reap- ])ears here, it has been greatly modified. The history now ends not with the tragedy of the Foscari, but with the extinction of the Republic in 1797. Thus the narrative, instead of breaking off arbitrarily in the middle of the fifteenth century, is complete, allowing the reader to contemplate that last impressive period in the life of Venice — the period of unparalleled magnificence behind which lurked unsuspected ruin. A captious critic might easily point out that a work produced by suc- cessive accretions cannot have that unity and symmetry which belong to the highest works of art — whether they be histories, paintings or poems — giving them the effect of having been created by a single swift, mas- terful stroke ; even when we know, as in the case of The Divine Comedy, that the act of creation extended over many years. More serious than this defect, especially in a history, would be the evidence that the author had not kept up with the unearthing of new material, which, in what relates to Venice, has been both bulky and important during the past forty years. So far as the present reviewer has observed, however, Mr. Hazlitt has not slighted the new stores of material, although he has probably set a different value on some of them from what he would have done had he begun to write in 1890 instead of in 1857. Comparing the edition of