Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/637

 1920 SHORT NOTICES 629 have been interesting to have added to the succinct account of the cession of Ferrara to the Holy See that that event is commemorated in an inscrip- tion in the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. Mrs. Trevelyan has taken great pains to verify her facts, and her book, with its choice illustrations and maps, should interest English readers in the history of a country which her husband's Garibaldian trilogy has done so much to popularize. Only it must not be forgotten that the modern Italians naturally desire to be known and appreciated for what they have done since 1870 rather than for their ancestors' achievements in antiquity, in the middle ages, or even in the Risorgimento. That is why their recent history is so valuable and so essential to a true understanding of Italy. W. M. We have received tl#ee short histories of Belgium all written by practised Belgian authors, two of them being English translations and the third in the original French. Dr. Leon Van der Essen has published a second edition of his Short History of Belgium (Chicago : University Press, 1920),^ the main change being the addition of a chapter on the recent war. M. H. Vander Linden's Belgium, the Making of a Nation (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1920) is a longer book and is intended for more studious readers. The author has not quite surmounted some of the difficulties of compression. On p. 135, for instance, he says that Montigny was sent to Philip II ' to explain the dangers of the situation, but this step was vain ', and there is no further reference to this mission except the inaccurate statement that Alva ' sent orders to Spain that the same fate ' as that of Egmont and Hoorn ' should be inflicted on the unfortunate Montigny ' (p. 139). This would leave an uninstructed reader rather unnecessarily in the dark. Except for faults of this kind M. Vander Linden's work, which stops at 1914, is adequate for its purpose, and in printing and arrangement it is far superior to the other two. In these respects the third, M. Frans van Kalken's Histoire de Belgique (Brussels : Office de Publicite, 1920), is so inconvenient that we can hardly imagine any one reading it through except a well-driven schoolboy. It gives, with genealogical tables and illustrations, a general and patriotic history down to the end of the war. B. The arrangement of Mr. D. P. Heatley's Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1919) is so far from orderly that its usefulness is very much impaired, and one has even some doubt as to what the author really aimed at doing. The first part of the book consists of an essay on the machinery of diplomacy and the qualities of the good diplomatist, with five supplementary notes, consisting mainly of illustrative quotations. This is followed by a long classified list of books on various branches of the subject with extracts and other indica- tions of their contents, but unfortunately with so many omissions that it cannot be called a systematic guide to the literature of the subject. Lastly, there are two appendixes of further extracts to supplement the argument of the first part. Much of the matter thus put together is of great interest, ' See ante, xxxi. 614.