Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/138

128 ■ Rcvicios of Books the principal "plank" in the Reformers' "platform," and a few lines farther on we are informed that 1' Hospital increased the number of his enemies daily " by his stern opposition to anything in the nature of a Job. ' ' We fear that many may be deterred from reading this excellent book by what we cannot avoid regarding as an injudicious incorporation in the text of whole clauses and frequently long sentences in foreign languages. A good stiff quotation in Latin or French even when relegated to a foot- note will startle your easy-going reader when descried from afar. What will become of his composure if he runs directly against a brace of lines in the very sentence he has entered upon and finds no room for retreat, so that he must needs grapple with their difficulties or ignominiously succumb? For example, page loo seems written expressly for readers familiar with the old French. Out of its twenty-four lines, full ten are in that tongue, the citations being distributed in three or four sentences. In not one case would the foreign words lose force by translation into E"Sl'^^- Henry M. Baird. .1 History of the English Church during the Civil JJars and under tlic Conimomvealtli, 1 640-1660. By Willi.am A. Shaw. (Lon- don and New York : Longmans, Green and Co. 1900. Two vols., pp. xxxvi, 384, 707.) Old writers upon Puritan history devoted their pages to a record of the sufferings of their heroes and heroines, an account of their perse- cutions at home and of their battles abroad, and an apology for their opinions and beliefs. They had much to say about what was done to the Puritans and about what the Puritans themselves would do, but of what they actually accomplished little was written. Mr. Shaw's book represents a very different type of history. It is neither a record of the struggles of sect with sect nor is it an account of different forms of relig- ious doctrine, but it is a history of what the author calls the most com- plete and drastic revolution which the Church of England has ever undergone, a history of the development of the Puritan ecclesiastical polity. For the writing of the history of this ecclesiastical revolution no one was better fitted than Mr. Shaw. In 1890 he edited for the Chetham Society the Minutes of the Manchester Presl>yterian Classis, the most perfect of surviving records of Presbyterianism under the Commonwealth, and in 1896 the Minutes of the Bury Classis. In the same period he also edited the proceedings of the Plundered Ministers' Committee for the Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, and now, in several appen- dices, he has set down all the cases of clergymen tried, imprisoned, sequestered, ejected, nominated, or promoted to benefices by the various parliamentary committees for deprived clergymen, for plundered minis- ters, for scandalous ministers, for reformation of the universities, etc., recorded in the Commons Journals and Lords' Journals. More than