Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/453

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 445 A reader of these letters will be struck by the intense bitterness of Canadian politics. The spirit of party was everywhere. In not one letter is Macdonald betrayed into writing a generous word about any opponent, though with several he corresponded freely, and to some even gave advice. His manoeuvres in 1871, on the American treaty, to get the liberals com- mitted to opposition of what he himself disliked, and then steal their thunder, were at the same time clever and unsavoury. The worst instance of faction in the book is not from Macdonald's pen, but from that of Goldwin Smith (p. 273) on the assassination of George Brown. That Brown did not die of his wound for six weeks does not excuse a letter suggesting that 'Brown most likely provoked ' his assailant 'by some insolence ', and giving the impression that in the writer's view to retaliate by pistol-shot for an insult of which there was never any evidence was almost excusable. E. M. WRONG. Histoire Generate de la Chine. Par HENRI CORDIER, Membre de 1'Institut. 4 tomes. (Paris : Gauthier, 1920-1.) AN excellent portrait of this indefatigable orientalist appears in the April number of the New China Review for 1921, strongly reminiscent, in flowing beard and general features, of the late Henry Hyndman, the handsome and courtly socialist. Professor Cordier's arrival in China synchronized with that of the writer, whose first sinological efforts in the Journal of the Shanghai Asiatic Society passed through the hands of M. Cordier in his capacity of librarian to that institution ; unfortunately the latter left China for good in 1876, and thus deprived himself of the opportunity to become in all respects what Professor Hirth calls one of the Fachleute ; he may thus be classed rather with the distinguished medical doctors, Bretschneider and Bushell, who, though not exactly speaking and reading sinologists in the usually accepted sense of the word, yet did as much for the general knowledge of China as most official specialists in the language and literature, if not, indeed, more than the average. M. Cordier's four volumes, containing nearly 2,000 pages in all, may truly be styled, as M. Chavannes would have said, an ceuvre magistrate, though in consequence of the entire absence of Chinese ideographs,, and the (to most persons) puzzling use of Annamese, Corean, and Japanese equivalent transliterations where proper Chinese names (in ideograph) are involved ; not to speak of French, English, Russian, and other European spelling of the same ideographs the total result is that, to use the exact words of one of M. Cordier's genuinely sinological colleagues, ' c'est vrai, le livre de Cordier est bien indigeste '. Notwithstanding, it is a vast treasure-house of historical information for those who have studied and written about the original Chinese histories, and have perused the critical miscellaneous studies of Laufer, Deveria, Sylvain Levi, Chavannes, Pelliot, and a score or more of other sound specialists. Of course in M. Cordier's book we have Palladius (Kafaroff), Hirth, Forke, De Groot, Groeneveldt, Giles, Chalmers, and many others of various nationalities quoted for us ; but there is no mistake about the main fact that the French have givea