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148 SHORT NOTICES January the life of Martin, who was governor of Turin from 1539 to 1542, and deputy lieutenant-general for Normandy from 1551 to his death in 1559, is prefixed to volume iv. It was probably in 1556 that the Memoires were completed, but they were not published till 1569, under the supervision of Rene Du Bellay, Martin's cousin and son-in-law. A. T. The Tractaet van Dychagie of Andries Vierlingh, edited by Dr. J. de Hullu and Ir. A. J. Verhoeven for the Ryks Geschiedkundige Publication (The Hague : Nijhoff, 1920), is a peculiarly Dutch book. It is a sixteenth- century treatise, the supposed date being about 1576, on the art of con- structing and maintaining dykes. The author, Andries Vierlingh, was steward to the princes of Orange at Steenbergen, a Brabant village, which lay then closer to the Zeeland waters than it does now, and where the art of ' dykage ' was of paramount importance. Vierlingh also fulfilled the post of ' dyke-grave ' in one polder and owned land in others. In the course of a long life he accumulated a vast experience which caused him to become known far and wide as an authority on all questions con- cerning controlling the waters and ' poldering in ' new land. He lacked time to finish the treatise in which in his old age he meant to lay down all his lore about dykes, sluices, sandplates, and the like for the benefit of all who struggled with the water in the Netherlands, and it was never published until now. Its interest now is of course mainly historical, although Mr. Verhoeven, the hydraulic engineer, whose expert help Dr. de Hullu, the archivist, sought for the publication of this very tech- nical work, declares that not only does he not know of any other work on the subject planned on such a comprehensive scale, but that it may still have some practical value for the present-day engineer. Nor is the book without interest to the general historian. Vierlingh devotes a good deal of attention to the human side of the subject. We learn much from him about the administration of the polder system in the sixteenth century. One of the things on which he insists most strongly is the disgraceful peculation of which most dyke-graves and contractors were guilty. Vierlingh's principal remedy is a democratic change in the method of the election of the dyke-grave, for which he wanted all landed proprietors in a given polder to have a vote, a wish which has been realized long since. P. G. Another volume in the National History of France has been published in the English translation, that of M. Jacques Boulenger on The Seventeenth Century (London : Heinemann, 1920). Dealing with the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, it is a good example of a popular manual written with spirit and skill by one who knows the memoirs of the period well. There is little to be said of the chapters that treat, briefly and superficially, of foreign policy, and the most suggestive comments are in the accounts of justice, finance, and administration. It is noticeable that from writers of to-day the two kings, and Vancien regime generally, receive more praise than they used to receive a generation ago, though M. Boulenger makes no concealment of the occasional sufferings of the poorer classes, and gives a vivid picture of the conditions under which