Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/933

Minor Notices 923 son of a clergyman, sometime rector of Leverton in Lincolnshire, was born near St. Albans in 1576. As the tutor of the sons of the earl of Arundel and of others of 'the English nobility, he travelled considerably on the Continent and enjoyed, for a time, comparative prosperity, but in the years before and during the Civil War, Peacham was forgotten by influential friends and died, presumably in poverty, in 1644. The Complcat Gentleman was printed first in 1622, and appeared, during the next forty years, in various revised and enlarged editions. It is a record of the manners of the Cavalier gentry before the Civil War, and it enjoyed the esteem of the courtiers of the Restoration. Its Puritan counterpart was Braithwaite's English Gentleman. Peacham was a survival of the best of the Renaissance, who believed, with the courtiers of Elizabeth, in the gentleman born, and in learning as the fountain of the graces. The themes of his book range accordingly from nobility in general to geometry and music, and even to the humble art .of fishing; and his avowed purpose in it was to rescue young gentlemen from the common education, which was, according to him, " to weare the best cloathes, eate, sleepe, drinke much, and know nothing ". A more recent issue of the same series is a reprint of Sir Fulke Gre- ville's Life of Sir Philip Sidney, with an introduction and notes by Newell Smith, late Fellow of New College (Clarendon Press, 1907, pp. xxxii, 279.) Greville was a kinsman of Sidney and Essex, and a favorite of Elizabeth, of whom he was a devoted adherent. His Life of Sir Philip Sidney was first published by an unknown editor in 1652. Although the work is the first authority for some well-known stories of Sidney, it is not a regular biography. Greville's primary object in the work was to dedicate his poems to his distinguished kinsman, who was long since dead. This dedication developed into a treatise, of which much the greater part consists of reflections on the political problems of Elizabeth's reign and Sidney's views concerning them, and on Elizabeth's methods of government. The Shirbitrn Ballads, ijS^^-1616. Edited from the jNIS. by Andrew Clark, Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907, pp. viii, 380.) The MS. from which the bulk of this volume is taken is preserved in the library of the Earl of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, and is a contemporary manuscript copy of Eliza- bethan and Jacobean ballads, which were originally printed in black- letter and issued in the perishable form of broadsides. The appendix of the volume contains some supplementary ballads from the Bodleian MS. Rawlinson poet. 1S5. While many of the ballads here printed are found — although frequently in the form of later exemplars — in the Roxburghe Ballads and the other great collections, yet a number appear to be unique specimens. The editor deserves much praise for the pains he has taken to make this book serviceable to the student of Elizabethan social conditions.