Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/605

 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 597 proceeded to take down the sculptures, they * almost raised an insurrec- tion ' and were obliged to desist. Elsewhere he was more successful. ' From Angory I had a half-woman, brought 18 days by land, upon change of mules, which wants a hand, a nose, a lip ; and is so deformed that she makes me remember a hospital ' (p. 274). And Arundel did ultimately secure a number of statues and some precious inscriptions. The modern archaeologist will shudder at the thought that these perishable objects were set up in the garden of his London house, exposed to our damp climate and the smoke of the capital. The total want of scholarship which Clarendon imputes to the earl also seems improbable in view of the facts brought together by Miss Hervey. Arundel was a collector of rare books and old manuscripts. When passing through Nuremberg on his embassy to the emperor, he seized the oppor- tunity to secure the Pirkheimer (not as printed in this volume, Dirk- heimer) library. He was the friend of Camden, Cotton, Spelman, Selden, and the famous Dr. Harvey. Altogether he was worthy of this elaborate biography. Now that the fate which befell Italy in the seventeenth century has overtaken England and those treasures of art and erudition which made her the wonder of the world are scattering to all the winds of heaven, we may recall with respect and tenderness the name of the first famous English collector. Miss Hervey, unhappily, did not live to com- plete the Life, and Miss Phillimore, who undertook the pious task, has committed a grave error on p. 436, where a resolution of the king and queen in 1642 is mentioned as a resolution of the house of commons. F. C. Montague. HistoiredeBelgique,vo.v. Par H. Pirenne. (Brussels: Lamertin, 1921.) Professor Pirenne's great work on the history of Belgium, the first volume of which was published in 1898, 1 still pursues its way in spite of the interruption of the war and the author's exile. In an interesting preface the professor describes how he completed this volume during the first year of the German invasion, how he was then deported to Germany, leaving his precious manuscript in the safe keeping of his wife, and after the final victory was able to add the finishing touches rendered possible by better access to books. This volume covers the period from the peace of Miinster to the end of the Austrian dominion at the time of the French Revolution, as he truly says the most unhappy of all times for his country, when Belgium was the souffre-douleur of Europe. But, though he no doubt had much temptation to point the moral of. the present from the past, all the more as he was writing in what he calls ' le sein de cette prison collective que Gand etait devenu sous le joug allemand ', yet he claims with justice that he has written it ' sine ira et studio, sans colere et sans prevention '. Those familiar with previous volumes of this history will remember that the author makes no pretensions to much original research. He himself merely claims that his work is partly a synthesis of the labours of previous searchers in the field, partly, as he puts it in the preface to 1 See ante. xvi. 555, xviii. 783, xxvii. 362.