Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/624

 616 When he died prematurely in 1913, the late Mr. Frank Taylor was not far from having completed his book The Wars of Marlborough (Oxford : Blackwell, 1921), which now appears in two handsome volumes edited by his sister Miss G. Winifred Taylor. Miss Taylor has supplied references for almost all the citations of authorities, but has not made up the gaps of the unfinished text. The chapters which deal with events before the war of the Spanish Succession and after Malplaquet are given as appendixes because their condition is fragmentary, so that the main part of the book is a history of Maryborough's great war. The political background is sketched in with a consistent hostility to the whigs. Though not himself a soldier, Mr. Taylor looks at the events from a strictly military point of view, and begins his book with an essay on the principles of war, in which he points out the reasons for the dilatory and indecisive system of warfare into which Marlborough's direct and aggressive spirit cut so sharply. Although this essay belongs in some respects very clearly to the period between the South African and the German wars, the sound- ness of his military judgement is one of the points for which Mr. Taylor's work may be commended. Another is his vivid and captivating style. He himself, a little too modestly, speaks of his work as the combining of the results of Archdeacon Coxe's and Lord Wolseley's labours, but he made a wide, almost an exhaustive, study of the available printed authorities. One of them to which he devotes a good deal of attention is the little book of Sicco van Goslinga, the Dutch field-deputy. .As Mr. Taylor is an uncompromising enthusiast for Marlborough and supports him against every disparagement, Goslinga's inaccuracy, jealousy, and vanity expose him to very trenchant comment. In some of the passages, such as that relating to the march to Meldert in 1707 (ii. 7 f.), Mr. Taylor does not seem to have explained the apparent discrepancies, especially of chronology, between Goslinga and Coxe, but it would be unfair to lay too much stress on points of this kind, which would doubtless have been corrected in the author's revision. In the main the criticism of Goslinga is just, and this is important because Goslinga's influence, through Wagenaar and other writers, has been considerable. The general narrative is clearly and admirably done, and deserves the warm commendation given in an introduction by the Hon. John Fortescue. The ten maps by Mr. H. W. Cribb are of a quality seldom seen in books of military or any other history. G. N. C. At the present moment, when projects for the perpetual peace of the world once more attract a more than casual interest, Dr. Wolfgang Michael's monograph, both full and terse, on the Abbe de Saint-Pierre and his celebrated tractate should not be overlooked. It gives the introduction to a German version (Bearbeitung) of that production, included in Meinecke and Oncken's series Klassiker der Politik (vol. i v, Berlin : Robbing, 1922). The indefatigable abbe's literary biography is full of interesting passages, such as his expulsion from the French Academy because of an attack on the memory of Louis XIV, his salutation of Fleury as the physician of Europe (' You her apothecary '), and his appeal, two years before his death, to Frederick II, urging him to imitate before it is too