Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/265

 12 S. I. MAR. 25, 1916.1 NOTES AND QUERIES.

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should be brought in without mention of their deflection from the Catholic faith. The writer argues strenuously in favour of the equality among themselves of the five Patriarchs of the Church whom he prefers to call Popes indeed, it soon becomes clear that the refutation of the supremacy of the Roman See is a main thesis of the whole work ; but he neglects to discuss in regard to this the appeal to Damasus to decide between two rival bishops at Antioch, nor in his admiring account of Leo the Great does he refer to the rescript of Valentinian on the subject of the dominion of the See of Peter.

Examples of this kind might be multiplied, and undeniably, by their frequency, leave on the mind an impression of insecurity, of superficiality ; and we should not be astonished to find the pro- fessed historian casting the book aside as being hack-work, and not worth attention.

In which, however, that learned historian would be doing an injustice. For if, from the point of view of accuracy in minute detail, the book leaves a good deal to be desired ; and if, what is more important, a failure to state the whole of the elements of a problem sometimes leaves the judgment proposed doubtful, it is, at any rate, written from a point of view far removed from that of the hack. It does not seem to us to bring a student's training to bear upon the huge welter of material to be dealt with ; but it does bring a freshness, shrewdness, common sense, and cordial humanity which suggest, perhaps, a mind trained primarily for action, and which result in originality of judgment, and in some revision of relations and proportions over the whole field.

The merits and defects of the book come out most strongly in the eight or nine instances where the author invites us to revise the estimate which has commonly prevailed hitherto of certain periods and characters. We may say that, on the whole, we are in agreement with him. Tiberius has before this found defenders; but we do not re- member any sketch of him in that sense which, alongside of the qualities of the emperor and the soldier, brings out so fully and effectively the qualities of the man. The account of Messalina towards whom our author displays an indignant tenderness as having been basely slandered is interesting and plausible. Another portrait which proves its effectiveness by the way it impresses itself on the memory is that of Gratian, who from the obscurity in which Gibbon left him is here drawn out into the light as the ideal Christian emperor. These are mentioned but as examples. The por- traiture throughout the book is vivid, and more often than not conceived and rendered with some measure of acuteness and originality. But it is somewhat insufficiently documented, even for a popular work ; and even where the grounds of the opinions expressed are indicated, this is done most often in so haphazard a fashion that the work appears less sound and more careless than it actually is.

This is particularly the case in regard to one of the main points which the author sets out to make the general superiority, as to the wealth and stability of the Roman Empire, and the happiness and civilization of mankind, of the fourth century over the second. Constantino, Valentinian, Gratian, Theodosius, these ought to be the emperors who represent for us the zenith of the Roman Empire ; not Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines. This is,

of course, a contention which, if accepted, would' 1 materially alter the common conception of the- conditions which favoured the spread of Chris- tianity, and the mode and results of its acceptance on the part of the State. We remember, for example, sundry pages from the pen of Prof. Eucken about the Christian religion being fundamentally a refuge for the weak and unhappy in a time of general misery and decline, which would require to be rewritten ; and some recent views on the escha- tology of the early Church would likewise have to be modified.

The account of the ten persecutions considered as a scheme, and as to the way in which it is brought into connexion with the account of" the general history of the first three centuries, is very good ; but there is no sufficient criticism of the different opinions which have prevailed as to the trustworthiness of the traditions con- cerning the martyrdoms. There has been for- some time a tendency to minimize these ; this is lightly referred to in a foot-note, but should surely have been treated in some detail.

The notices of the buildings erected by the several emperors and particularly the descrip- tions of the palaces of the Caesars at Rome, and* of the churches at Ravenna are a distinctly goodT. and valuable feature of the book ; and a word of hearty praise of the photographs must not be omitted. The Appendixes, also, are well thought out and useful.

While the faults of this book are, as we have indicated, numerous and fairly obvious, we emphatically desire to close on a note of appre- ciation. It was a courageous thing to attempt such a task as this, and it was attempting a great service. These centuries, which lie waste and empty in the imagination of the great majority of well-read persons, contain a wealth of matter which is not merely fascinating to the leisured and curious, but also, politically and socially, profoundly instructive. To make it usefully available from the latter point of view the first thing to do is to give it substance, a familiar aspect, a scheme and sequence of intelligible and, at least, roughly correct propor- tion, and therewith to make the men and women live. This, if we have rightly understood him, was the author's design and it would seem, alongside of this, to trace, somewhat in the spirit of an epic, the history of the spread of Christianity as the leaven leavening the lump of the world. We congratulate him both on having made the attempt and on having so largely succeeded in it.

FRENCH BOOKS AND AUTOGRAPHS.

LOVERS of France, of French literature and French cleverness, will find choice of many good items in the catalogues this month, even though those of quite first-class importance are to seek.

Mr. P. M. Barnard of Tunbridge Wells, who sends us a Catalogue (No. 107) of something over five hundred items, describes among them a large proportion of French works, especially in the way of erudite productions. Thus he has seven collections of Graux's divers essays on biblio- graphical matters and Greek and Latin texts, as- well as a copy of the ' Recueil de travaux d'^rudition classique,* which was published in 1884 as a tribute to his memory (14*.). There are four examples of Claudin, and one of these is a