Minor Notices 171 It is thus, in a modest preface, that M. Hauser explains his presence among the Olympians. Modesty may induce him to depreciate what he has done, but he has no other reason for so doing. Indeed, he may be proud of the work here accomplished. There are grave difficulties at- tached to a bibliographical study of French history between 1483 and 1 5 15. The period falls between two stools. Potthast and Chevalier both come to an end and there is a great lack of previous critical work in this field. Moreover in the transition from the Italian to the French Renais- sance history and literature run together. Commines and Machiavelli are men of letters as well as historians ; the same is true of Brantome. But the question is a relative one in another way. Brantome is a direct source for the history of the civil wars in France; yet he cannot be wholly excluded for the history of the Italian wars, since his information thereon was gathered from actual participants and eye-witnesses. This is the case also with De Thou in the subsequent generation, who was born in 1553, yet began his great history with the year 1546, learning much of what he wrote from his father and his father's friends. But there are other difficulties still attending bibliographical research in this period of history which do not characterize the historiography of the Middle Age. Diplomacy becomes a science, and the records thereof are beginning to become a primary historical source. Printing adds a new historical source (as M. Hauser indicates in a most interesting way in section 3) and magnifies the volume of all the others. The reviewer has little to add and nothing to subtract from the work here done, for it seems to have been most thoroughly accomplished. The Calendar of State Papers, I'enetian, is much beyond 1594, which is stated in section 89 to be its present terminal point. There are two typo- graphical errors not noticed in the Errata. On p. 105 the proper name Gough is misspelled, and on p. 165 XIV^ is obviously a misprint for XVIe. James Westf.all Thompson. Briefe an Erasmus aus eineni Bresslauer Codex. Edited by L. K. Enthoven. (Strassburg, J. H. E. Heitz, 1906, pp. xiv, 223.) Professor Enthoven of Strassburg publishes a valuable addition to Erasmian litera- ture in the form of one hundred and sixty-three letters addressed to the great Humanist by nearly as many correspondents. These letters form together a codex of the town library of Bresslau. They were known and used by Adalbert Horawitz, the lamented Erasmian scholar, whose early death disappointed so many just expectations in this field. More- over, other scholars have made occasional extracts from them, and at least sixty-six have already been published by various editors. The actually new contribution of the present edition reduces itself, therefore, to about one hundred numbers, but a careful comparison has been made in the case of the letters already published, and a very considerable service has been rendered in making the reading of obscure passages more Intel-
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