Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/363

 n s. v. APRIL is, 1912.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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on B80oks.

Thomas Dckker : a Study. By Mary Leland Hunt, Ph.D. (New York, Columbia University Press.)

THIS monograph belongs to the Columbia Uni- versity Studies in English, and is issued with the official approval of the Department of English and Comparative Literature in that University " as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publi- cation." Scholars on our side of the Atlantic may well endorse the approval. A more exact and comprehensive study of Dekker has long been a desideratum, and that the rather because, in his case, defective chronology and ignorance of minuter details have led to some undue deprecia- tion both of his character and his work. Dr. Hunt, in her " happy comradeship of three years," has plainly acquired that close and sym- pathetic intimacy with her author which is one of the first conditions of competence to deliver judgment on a man's work as a whole. In her pages Dekker is convincingly shown to have been far less improvident and ungoverned, far more resolute in adherence to an ideal, than he has been commonly represented. Her estimate of his work carries somewhat further the more favourable criticism of recent years, and she has done him good service by the sure and delicate discrimination with which she separates out his share in the different collaborated plays, more especially in her discussion of his relations with Middleton. There is a Bibliographical Note giving the principal books in which accounts of Dekker may be found, and the editions of plays and other texts that have appeared ; but we were dis- appointed not to find a chronological list of the whole of his works. This is the more to be wished for as there are no tabular statements of any kind in the body of the monograph.

The Nineteenth Century and After has three interesting papers dealing with Eastern questions : that by Prof. Vamb^ry on the rapprochement taking place between Moslems and Buddhists ; an account by Lady Blake of ' The Triad Society and the Restoration of the Ming Dynasty ' ; and Sir Andrew Eraser's warning concerning ' Sec- tarian Universities in India.' Lady Blake's paper is full of curious information, derived, at least in part, from volumes which have fallen into the hands of the police in Sumatra and Hong Kong. Mr. Hamilton-Hoare's paper on ' Horace and the Social Life of Rome ' tells nothing that is not already familiar to the classical scholar, but it is pleasantly written, and may well afford entertainment to those who, without having made an intimate friend of the good Flaccus, have kindly, albeit vague, memories of what they learnt about him in their youth. Mrs. Algernon Grosvenor's article ' A Catholic Layman,' i.e., her father, Sir John Simeon, has many delightful, if somewhat, shadowy recollections of the nine- teenth-century men-; Gladstone, Newman, Tenny- son, Aubrey de Vere, and others who were his friends. Dr. J. E. Gillet in' A Forgotten German Creditor of the English Stage ' traces the present unsatisfactory state of our drama result of the " conflict between the acting and the poetical drama " to the influence of Kotzebue ; and in ' Oratorio versus Opera ' Mr. Heathcote Statham

vigorously maintains that, musically, oratorio, appealing, as it does, more exclusively to the intellect, is a higher form of art than opera, complicated by the simultaneous appeal to the eye.

THE April Cornhill Magazine has several articles of unusual interest. Sir Henry Lucy, continuing his ' Sixty Years in the Wilderness,' discourses on Lord MacDonnell and on the Shah's visit to London, and then gives us nine or ten miscel- laneous ' Memories ' from his diary of 1888 and 1889, each one of the nature of a " cameo " a brief, incisive picture of a person or an event. Mrs. Barnett's paper on the letters written to her by children who had had their share of the ' Country Holiday Fun' ' is full of good things. Mr. T. C. Fowle follows up last month's account of the " whirling Darweeshes " with a description of the self -mutilating fraternity. It must, indeed, have required courage to sit through the per- formance he describes. His explanation of the feats and of their painlessness is that the sword is run, not through any organ or through muscle,, but merely through fat. Mr. Harold Armitage contributes a biography of Godfrey Sykes, designer of The Cornhill cover, and alludes to the- controversy upon the " Sower" which was carried, on in our columns in 1910. Miss Helen Sturge's 1 Return from Varennes : as seen by an English Girl,' was well worth preserving, and shows the soldiers of the Revolution in an unexpectedly^ genial light. ' The Soldier's Breviary is, of course, the ' Commentaries ' of Montluc the soldier who was charged to extirpate the Huguenots, a task in which the best-known action was the St. Bartholomew massacre.. We would commend to special attention Mr.. Cadogan's ' On the Threshold of Russia.' The writer accompanied the British deputation which, last January, visited St. Petersburg and Moscow^ Amid many interesting points, we noticed his. description of the Tauris palace, which serves as the Russian Parliament-house ; his admiration of the Neva at St. Petersburg ; his notes on Rus- sian art and music ; and, what he lays most stress on, the intensity and all-pervasiveness of Russian religious feeling.

The Burlington Magazine sets out with Miv Dalton's discussion of the Byzantine Enamels in Mr. Pierpont Morgan's collection. He traces the happy effect, in the treatment of figures by the enamellers, of their self-effacing and whole- hearted acceptance of convention. Next we- have a plate of the new Giovanni Bellini bought by M. Leprieur for the Louvre ' The Redeemer,' a most touching and impressive work, which the sympathetic description of Mr. Roger Fry enables us to clothe, in imagination, with the significant colouring of the painting. Mr. Fry also continues his account of the exhibition of Early Venetian pictures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Semitecolo and Crivelli are the two chief painters dealt with, but along with them is the charming ' Jerome ' of a " little master," Giovanni Mansueti. M. Rivoira, when at St. Andrews last year for- the Quincentenary Celebration, examined the remains of the Church of St. Rule and the stone carvings collected in the Cathedral Museum, with the result that he differs from philologists and archaeologists in general as to the date he wou'd assign to the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosse?,, and he sets forth here his reasons for differing.