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 564 Reviews 0/ Books partial judgment and finished style which it has learned to expect in Mr. Morley's books. The historian will read it with pleasure and profit, but the serious student will return with undiminished loyalty to his Gardiner and his Firth. One does not read many pages in Mr. Roosevelt's book without grave misgivings. The only authorities he sees fit to mention are Macaulay and Carlyle. Nothing is said of Mr. Gardiner or of Mr. Firth, whose writings it may be said with hardly an exaggeration, have super- seded all others. Mr. Roosevelt might plead, to be sure, that life is short and Gardiner is long, but the obvious answer would be that anyone who has not time to read and re-read Mr. Gardiner's delightful though voluminous pages has not time to write a life of Cromwell. It would be rash to assert that Mr. Roosevelt has not read them, but it is safe to say that he has done so to no particular purpose. To him, Laud is a " small narrow man" with a "silly" policy of enforced uniformity. Went- worth is a traitor to the Parliamentary cause who "had obtained his price" from the King. Cromwell is a noble man whose early promise was blasted by personal ambition, " cursed with a love of power." Mr. Roosevelt is ill at ease in the seventeeth century. It is in fact a hard century to understand since it is enough like our own to mislead us continually by false analogies. But Mr. Roosevelt's method of avoiding the difficulty by substituting the modern analogy in every case and argu- ing quietly upon that, is the worst possible. The book may in fact be described as a slight thread of Cromwellian narrative, taken from more or less old-fashioned writers, explained and amplified by references to Mr. Roosevelt's own experiences and to events of American history, es- pecially of recent American history. Sometimes the analogies are ut- terly misleading, sometimes the transitions are so sudden and unexpected as to border upon the comic. One does not get far in the following without exclaiming, "The Germans of New York!" "The Puritan fashion for regulating, not merely the religion, but the morals and the manners of their neighbors, especially in the matter of Sunday observ- ance and pastimes generally, was peculiarly exasperating to men of a more easy-going nature. Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best citizens are prone to de- vote their utmost energies, not to striving for the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government, but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent pleasures ; while, on the other hand, a large number of good citizens, in their irritation at any in- terference with what they feel to be legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corruption of misrule rather than submit to what they call 'Puri- tanism. '" This is harmless enough. A much more serious case is where Cromwell's constitutional difficulties are compared to those of Washington and Lincoln and he is judged harshly for not ruling as con- stitutionally as they did. One will look long for a book in which one