Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/475

 1921 467 Short Notices The pages of our present number bear witness to the fact that Sir Adolphus Ward's pen is still unwearied, and we are glad to think that, in accepting an invitation to edit the more important of his contributions to periodicals, he does not collect a completed series. The entire set will cover many other subjects, literary and general, but we have now before us the first two handsome volumes of the Collected Papers of Sir A. W. Ward (Cambridge : University Press, 1921) which contain the historical essays. Written at intervals over a period of nearly sixty years, they have a wide range, from Friedlander's work on manners under the Roman Empire to the Hohenlohe Memoirs of our own time, though naturally the greatest space is devoted to the centuries which Sir Adolphus has most particularly studied, the seventeenth and eighteenth. The papers are reprinted practically as they were originally written, and, though once or twice he notices later events in a brief postscript, the author has avoided the temptation of bringing them ' up to date '. Some of them appeared in earlier volumes of this Review, others in other periodicals, while the well- known essays on ' The Peace of Europe ' and ' Elizabeth, Princess Palatine ' are reprinted from the volumes of Manchester essays, and that on the ■ Political Aims of the Nineteenth Century ' from the lectures given at the Cambridge Extension Meeting twenty years ago. Three lectures of 1891 on the decline of Prussia under Frederick William III, and one of 1912 on the effects of the Thirty Years' War, seem to be printed for the first time. The collection as a whole gives an impressive conspectus of long and eminent services to historical science. V. A good example of the dissertations submitted by students of American universities for the degree of Ph.D. is Dr. Lucile Craven's Antony's Oriental Policy until the Defeat of the Parthian Expedition (University of Missouri, 1920), which discusses in great detail and with almost pedantic reference to authorities the doings of Antony in the East during the years 42-36 B.C. While not attempting to whitewash the character of Antony, Dr. Craven shows that ancient historians tend to misrepresent his motives, and has no difficulty in establishing that much of his work was done in a competent way, and that, for instance, there is no need to attribute to bribery his support of the pro-Roman Herod. Again, we agree with Dr. Craven that it was only after his failure against Parthia and his break with Octavian that Antony formed the idea of setting up a rival kingdom in the East, a view which is perhaps not altogether novel. But there are two points on which the opinions here advanced are more questionable. An attack is made on what is admitted to be the unanimous view of Hh2