however, flatters himself, as he tells us in his preface, that he has some fresh light to throw upon the period, derived from the reports of the Venetian ambassadors at the English court during the seventeenth century. The readers of Mr. Motley have learnt how the dark places of history can be illumined by the throwing open of archives and statepaper offices to the diligent student; Ranke also hopes that he has "some, if he is not deceived, decisive revelations" to make to us. It is not, however, the secret motives of the actors in the historic drama, but the contemporary opinions of acute lookers-on, that have been unfolded to him in the archives of Venice. "The geographical remoteness" he writes, "of the republic of Venice "from England, and its neutral position "in the world, enabled its ambassadors "to devote a freer attention to the "affairs of England, and to observe "their course while in close contact with "the men who swayed them.” doubt a great deal may be gained from such sources as this; but we think they ought to be used with distrust. The gossip of the court an ambassador might faithfully reproduce, and acutely estimate; but the closest contact with influential men could not prevent him from falling into great blunders as to the state of the country.

No

But a discussion of our author's more detailed narrative may be well deferred till its completion, or at least till another volume has been published. At present we prefer to direct attention to the introductory abridgment, which seems to us to possess special interest. The making of an abridgment must be a difficult and ungrateful task for an historian; which may account for the fact, that none has hitherto been made of English history, except by mere book-makers. For his excellent performance of this task Professor Ranke deserves our thanks.

His

is no mere summary, but a sparing selection of facts with all the salient points impressively brought out, and the threads of connexion well kept up. Among other things, it is a satisfaction to see justice at length done to our

Anglo-Saxon ancestors. His account of the Anglo-Saxon period is real history; no mere patchwork of chronicles, or farrago of antiquarian inquiries. The contempt with which our ancestors before 1066, A. D. are treated by many historians, probably springs from a misapprehension of the relative civilization of Normans and Saxons. The fact is, that the Saxons, though far less refined, were far better educated than the Normans. In learning and laws they were decidedly in advance of them; the manners, however, of the Normans were more genteel.' But the refinement of the Normans was very superficial; they had not, as it is often supposed, become half Frenchified (in which case their transformation would have been unprecedentedly rapid); they were merely Norsemen with a French enamel. ingenuous arts that had mollified their manners had left them still savage in grain. Accordingly the Anglo-Saxon polity, crushed at first by the conquerors, ultimately reasserted itself, owing to its intrinsic merit. At the memorable crisis in our history, it was "the good laws of Edward the Confessor" that King John swore to obey.

The

It is partly from a pardonable pride of race that Ranke lays careful stress on the Anglo-Saxon polity. He considers it as the purest development of Germanic ideas; "purer," he says, "than in Ger

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many itself, influenced as that was by "the Frankish empire, which had em"bodied in itself many Roman tenden"cies." He remarks "that the settle"ments of the Anglo-Saxons were "supported by no imperial authorization, direct or indirect, and on no contract with the aborigines." And in the constitution that was the result of so natural and unrestrained growth, he traces a very distinct foreshadowing of our three estates. The deposable kings, the witans of nobles, and the communes of freemen, might easily be manipulated. into the present triple band" of our country. We have the whole course of Anglo-Saxon history traced in the same spirit. Our author dwells with a professorial fondness on Alfred, who was

no less one of the fathers of Germanic literature than the saviour of his country. He describes the splendour of the AngloSaxon kingdom under Edgar, Alfred's grandson, who bore sway over the islands and seas as far as Norway, and borrowed from the East and the West the titles of Basileus and Imperator. Then, when evil days followed, under Ethelred the Unready-when the blood of the murdered Edward had blighted, as it seemed, the prosperity of the land-when confidence between prince and nobles was broken-we observe how the AngloSaxon chiefs reasserted their hereditary rights, which had lain for some time dormant. They availed themselves with decision of the interregnum occasioned by the flight of Ethelred and the sudden death of the invader Sven. They offered to receive Ethelred again as king on fixed conditions. Those conditions he accepted, and then broke; and they determined to abandon for ever his degenerate race. They resolved, in a general assembly, to offer the crown to Canute, Sven's son, with sufficient provision that their rights should be respected. Formally, at least, Canute did not reign as a conqueror, but by election. Indeed, this king especially proves the absorptive power of AngloSaxon civilization. He was early baptised, though his father was the champion of reviving heathendom. We find him willingly contracting with the chiefs whom he could have conquered; and, notwithstanding his strongly-marked personal character, he appears by no means an innovator, but anxious always to uphold the laws of Edgar, and to be regarded his successor.

The Norman Conquest does not lose in importance in Ranke's hands, though the magnitude of its immediate effect is somewhat reduced. It still stands out as the unique, painful, yet felicitous union of the two conflicting elements of modern civilization-the Romance and the Teutonic. By feudalism, hierarchy, chivalry, constraints civil and religious, the rude Teuton had to be trained; he was then to throw them off, and to lead mankind to free thought

and action. But the Teutonic element was at no time so completely crushed as has been represented. William professed only to dispossess the contumacious; and, though he applied this rule with autocratic latitude, we find that about half his nobles were still Anglo-Saxons. Conqueror as he was, he was far too astute to make conquest his title. The pope's patronage had been an essential element in his success; but he and all his successors, until John, refused to acknowledge the pope as their feudal chief, claiming to inherit from Edward the Confessor. It is observable that the associates of the conquest claimed, on their part, to inherit the valuable privileges of the Anglo Saxon chieftains. We find the English nobles subsequently combining the rights of the old witan with those they possessed as vassals of the new feudal state; and, as we have already noticed, the old Anglo-Saxon privileges formed the demand of the barons at Runnymede. Finally, Professor Ranke points out, as a decisively Anglo-Saxon characteristic of Magna Charta, the fact that by it privileges were secured to all classes, not, as in contemporary concessions made by continental crowns, to special sections of the community.

We have dwelt on this part of the abstract, as we think that the absorptive force of Anglo-Saxon civilization, shown equally towards Danish and Norman elements, has been somewhat neglected by our own historians. But an equally careful and penetrating selection is seen throughout the remainder. The growth of aristocratic independence, and the conflicts of the civil and religious heads, whose union would have proved irresistible, is well marked. The complications and cross-alliances of the four interests the king, the pope, the barons, and the national church, exemplified by the counterbalancing desertions of the two famous renegades, Thomas à Becket, from the cause of his royal master, and Stephen Langton, from the cause of his holy patron are clearly traced. The

sudden stride to the attainment of

Magna Charta, and the rapid reaction

in favour of royalty; the doubtful origin and wavering growth of our parliament, in which the rebel Simon de Montfort, and the favourite Hugh d'Espencer, play such important parts; the influence of Wiclif's teaching, half evangelical, half seditious-are all given in wellconsidered connexion. We are shown the nobility growing yearly ranker and riper for the scythe, until the Wars of the Roses appear in their true light, as a Nemesis upon them, and an ultimate blessing to the country. They had slaughtered the people with patrician insolence; they had oppressed the Lollards; they had made a league of selfishness with the degenerating clergy; they had shown themselves persecuting, greedy, unenlightened; and now, by their own hands, they were to be swept away. Their clearance made way for the birth of the new order of things, which forms the main labour of our historian.

We have endeavoured slightly to indicate the superiority in method of this preparatory compendium to most of those abridgments that are from time to time manufactured. It is true that, of late years, advances have been made in this department of literature; but much still remains to be done. The school-histories in use at some distinguished places of education evince an uncompromising neglect of modern researches. We may ask, moreover, why the barest summaries of facts-the mere stones of history, without an attempt at real buildingshould be thought peculiarly useful or palatable to youth? And we may fairly complain that certain principles, such as the divine right of kings, now definitely banished from polite society, should have found a refuge in seminaries. It may be doubted whether an actual translation of the earlier part of Ranke's history is the thing required; but we feel sure that a work imitating to a great extent his method, would fill a gap in our historical literature.

We may venture to say, in conclusion,

that Professor Ranke's work is well timed as regards his own countrymen. The history of the English constitution, and especially of its most critical period, will be studied with more interest, in proportion as the principles of that constitution are more truly valued. And, apparently, we are seeing a change of continental opinion in this direction. Till recently, most of the German liberals, though paying a certain tribute of admiration to the British constitution, were not wont to consider it as a model for imitation. They looked on it as a strange compromise between good and bad, as the best production of a dark age, but destined to yield to the simpler and purer forms of national freedom, or, at least, far inferior to them. They found their ideals in French theories, which America was supposed to have realized. Varnhagen von Ense was of opinion that Germany could learn much more from France than from England. Gervinus points to America as having reached the goal toward which the whole Teutonic race naturally presses. But the principles of constitutional monarchy seem now to have won a decided triumph in Europe. They have prevailed in Italy over Red-Republicanism, after a sharp struggle; they are making themselves. heard in the very strongholds of despotism, at Vienna and St. Petersburg; and they are slowly, but surely, advancing to realisation through all the limbs of divided Germany. We are not among those who laugh to scorn German politics, and speak of Germany as destined always to dream of and never to earn the blessings of free government. We have more faith in the nation that fought side by side with us the battle of religious liberty. Earnest, patient, self-sacrificing, Germany will gain political ground slowly, but will never recede; and, when she has emerged from the fancies of her boyhood, and the broodings of her youth, she will bear her manhood worthily, and not belie her kindred and descent.

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PERHAPS a little too much is made in these days of the supposed benefits of locomotion. There are some, at least, who think so. They quote with new zest, against the modern passion for tours and changes of air, the old proverb about the rolling stone which gathers no moss. They have a few pet instances with which to garnish their doctrine, that, by staying at home, a man may become as wise as he needs be. That of Socrates is, of course, at hand-who avowed that he found Athens so sufficient for him that he knew of nothing that would lure him beyond the walls, unless some one were to begin an argument with him and then walk backwards, tempting him with it as a horse might be tempted by a wisp of hay. So Kant, they tell us, never slept a night out of his native Königsberg. And how Johnson, though he yielded to the weakness of a tour or two, stuck theoretically to Cheapside and its purlieus! And what significance in the saying attributed to a German medical sage, who, to an admirer from a distance visiting him and remarking on the smallness of the walled garden of his house, which was his daily walk and place of meditation, said, "O yes, very narrow, indeed; but (looking up) everlastingly high, you see." If not in a walled garden, at least within the bounds of the city, or town, or parish in which one resides, there may surely be found an epitome of all nature and life-a competent proportion of all the objects and phenomena essentially interesting to man. By much shifting of place, may not the mind root itself less deeply than it ought in the true sources of nourishment? Did not Wordsworth, who had travelled a good deal, come round to this view at last? Did he not propound the notion that a man's natal spot, where

1 Vacation Tourists, and Notes of Travel in 1860. Edited by Francis Galton, M.A. F.R.S. Author of "The Art of Travel," &c. Macmillan and Co. Cambridge and London.

ever it might be, was, with some obvious exceptions, the spot where he ought to spend his life? The exceptions might be ambassadors and consuls, sailors and soldiers, observers of eclipses, commercial men, Queen's messengers, and Scotchmen. Nay, perhaps for all there might be a little relaxing of the rule. It would be hard to deny a poor fellow born inland a sight of the sea once or twice in his life; it would be fiendish that a Londoner should be permitted to go to his grave, not disabused of the fallacy that Primrose Hill is an eminence. Say, then, for the ordinary Briton, an annual visit to the sea-side, or a tour in the Highlands, or the Lake-district, if he wants it; and you yield enough!

Of what might be said on the other side, enough will suggest itself. Is it for nothing that men in all times have regarded travel as one of the means of education as a necessary "finish" even to a mind cultured to the utmost by the prior education of Home-influences, Neighbourhood, School and College, and Books? Is not locomotion one of the distinctions between animals and plants; does not the distinction attain its utmost in the chief animal, man; and shall men allow the distinction to rest nominal, and cheat nature's intention by behaving like tortoises or turnips? Is not civilization working this distinction, and strengthening, still strengthening the locomotive tendency? In the fact that, from the rush of so much recent activity into the single problem of increasing the means of intercommunication, we are now infinitely more familiar than our forefathers were with the idea of the limited dimensions of the Earth,

"A tidy ball, axled eight thousand miles," is there not a kind of licence, nay, an injunction, to individuals to extend their crawlings over this "tidy ball," so as to

view it round and round, and get the total image of it into their minds, in preparation for that era of cosmopolitical organization, of conjoint tenancy and a common system of bell-pulls, which may be coming? Or, apart from such highflying about so simple a matter, is there not sober evidence every day to prove that travel is a good as well as a pleasant thing?

The thirteen Vacation Tourists whose contributions form the pleasant volume before us, do not trouble themselves with the question for or against the practice in which they have been indulging. They are simply intelligent and cultivated men, distinguished graduates of the English Universities and the like, who, having, in 1860, or in former years, made the most of their vacation in tours according to their tastes, or been thrown by circumstances into distant and little-known parts of the Earth, have clubbed together their stories, so as to make a book of travels fit for general and easy reading. And yet the volume, both by the variety of its contents, and for other reasons, might more fitly raise the question of the real uses of travel than almost any other recently published. Here are thirteen men who take us with them, first to Naples and other parts of Italy, then to Hungary and Croatia, then in among the Slavonian nations generally, then to a Sutherlandshire hill-side, then to Peru, then to the Graian Alps and Mount Iseran, then to the Allelein Horn, then to Mount Cervin, then from Lauterbrunnen to the Ægishhorn by the LauwinenThor in one day, then to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, then to Norway, then to Northern Spain, and lastly, to Syria, and who, in the course of less than 500 pages, contrive to give us vivid impressions of scenery, life, and adventure in all these diverse regions of the Earth-which impressions they leave to sink into the mind, as it were mixed and in a jumble, to be there sorted for keeping, and turned to account as Providence may direct. Moreover, there is a probability that this volume is but the first of an annual series, in which the

same or other tourists will similarly club accounts of their vacation rambles. The book, therefore, fairly challenges any discussion that people may be inclined for as to the uses of locomotion in general, and of foreign travel in particular. It ought, also, to go a good way towards showing what these uses really are, how considerable they are in degree, and how peculiar in kind. For, as no reader of the volume can help enjoying by proxy some of the tours it describes, so there will be hardly any reader, however obstinately sedentary, that will not feel, with respect to one or more of them, that if he had been himself the tourist, he would have been much the better for it.

What travel does for the health and spirits is a theme as old as man's ailments, man's sorrows, and man's legs. The specific provided by nature for grief or low spirits is locomotion. Rest may be the cure in some cases, but locomotion is the general remedy-is, in some cases, the proper form of rest. If a man is in trouble of mind, does he not pace his room; if his trouble is fierce, does he not rush out, with or without his hat, and walk fast through the wind till he fatigues himself? Black care, says

Horace, sits behind the fleetest horseman; but he does not extend his remark to the pedestrian. And, for the ordinary preservation of health, even when there is no trouble of mind, what is the universal prescription? Exercise! And what is Exercise but more or less of locomotion? There may be locomotion in a yard square, in a room, in a park or cricket-ground, or over expanses of country, and through changing air. This last we call Travel. It is locomotion developed and made superb, and it has its uses where the minor forms of locomotion fail. In ordinary exercise-in walking, boating, a day's shooting or fishing in one's own neighbourhood, and the like there is sufficient tonic, in a general way, for the health and spirits of many hard-working Britons. Recently, too, there has been added a splendid novelty in this kind of accessible recreation in an institution which, next