9* s. m. FEB. 18/99.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
139
Vhen the war was in full swing, and the beleaguer-
ng army of Howe was itself beleaguered and com-
piled, not without a species of connivance on the
>art of Washington, to withdraw from Boston, the
nuch-needed reinforcements, instead of being sent
>y men-of-war, were kept tossing about on wretched
mlks ; financiers and people in high places would
not surrender their commission on the hire of
trading vessels. A farmer-general of finances in
3 "ranee could scarcely have done better. Some day,
perhaps, the world will learn how many battles
have been lost and how many thousands of lives
have been sacrificed to the greed of such. We
know few books that supply pictures of life in
England in the latter half of the eighteenth cen-
tury more animated than Sir George presents.
There are books enough in which the drunken,
rakehelly proceedings of the time are depicted.
The selection, however, is in this case the best that
could easily have been made. It is positively
saddening to hear how Fox, who read hard at
Hertford College, where he would gladly have
remained, was drawn back by his father " into the
vortex of idleness and dissipation." The most
sinister figure in Sir George's pages is the king
himself. The first volume closes with what is
cynically regarded as the triumph of the king :
" George the Third had at length accomplished his
purpose. He had rooted out frankness, courage, and
independence from the councils of the State; but
he had pulled up along with them other qualities
which his policy, when brought to a head, could
not afford to dispense with. His Cabinet was now
exclusively composed of men willing to pursue ends
which he dictated, but incapable of discerning, or
rightly directing, the means by which alone these
ends could be attained." At the close of the his-
tory, so far as it is given, Boston is abandoned, the
royal fleet has gone for good, and the American
cruisers pick up at their leisure the transports
bringing out the tardy reinforcements. Upwards
of two hundred Highlanders reach Boston not as
conquerors, but as prisoners of war. For the
beginning of the next volume Sir George reserves
the repulse of the British fleet off Charleston,
Carolina, and the Declaration of Independence.
His first volume will be closely studied in two
continents. Americans, at least, will not charge it
with blindness to their interests or injustice to their
IT
L.4-
Essays on Dante. By Dr. Karl Witte. Selected,
translated, and edited by C. Mabel Lawrence,
B.A., and Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. (Duck-
worth & Co.)
'o the student of Dante and who is not now a student of Dante ? this selection from the ' Dante- Forschungen ' of Karl Witte is a boon. When as a youth Witte issued his ' Ueber das Missverstandniss Dantes ' the study of Dante north of the Alps was just beginning. The date of the article, which first appeared in Hermes, was 1824, just ten years after /he appearance in England of Gary's translation. For more than half a century he continued to pour forth criticisms, reviews, and studies, until he became the principal figure in the Dante revival which is one of the most marked features of the atter half of the nineteenth century. It is satis- 'actory to have in a compact and handy volume a selection of what is of permanent value in Witte's writings on Dante. In a modest and sensible pre-
- ace Mr. Wicksteed confesses his doubts as to
whether his selection will be accepted as the best
that could have been made. He may console him-
self with the reflection that it is adequate. Much
that Witte says, as his editor owns, is contro-
vertible, and recent study of Dante has been so
close as to leave Witte in some respects belated.
Most of what is here given has value, and is wel-
come. Neither the appearance of the book nor its
handiness would have been improved, nor would
the English reader have profited, had Mr. Wick-
steed included reviews of German translations of
Dante and other like matters which are of transitory
and ephemeral interest. It would be worse than
useless to give a list of the contents, which, how-
ever, naturally include the ' Essays on Dante's
Trilogy,' the interesting popular lecture on ' Dante's
Cosmography,' the article on ' Dante and the Conti
Guidi,' that on the then recently discovered letters of
Dante, and the rather controversial study of ' Dante
and United Italy.' The share of the two translators
in the book is explained in a note. C. Mabel
Lawrence is responsible for the translations from
the German, and Mr. Wicksteed for those from
the Italian and for the revision and editing of the
whole. His are the excellent introduction, and
the notes and appendices, which are eminently
serviceable.
The Tatler. Edited by George A. Aitken. Vols.
III. and IV. (Duckworth & Co.) THE concluding volumes of Mr. Aitken's edition of the Tatler are naturally no less carefully anno- tated and edited than the two earlier volumes, for which see 9 th S. ii. 460. The notes are numer- ous and helpful, if occasionally rather timid, as when, in vol. iv., 'The Rivals,' 1668, a play, is said to be attributed to Sir William Davenant. It would have been better to say it is by Sir William Davenant, or preferably D'Avenant. ' The Rivals ' is an adaptation of the ' Two Noble Kinsmen.' The information that the singing by Mary Davis of "My lodging is on the cold ground/' introduced into the performance of this piece, caused Charles II. to take her off' the stage rests on the authority of Downes's ' Roscius Anglicanus,' but is, in fact, inaccurate. This edition of the Tatler is the best in all respects we possess, and, so far as can be judged, may well be final. The third volume has a portrait of Swift, the fourth a fancy sketch of Bickerstaff. The index is commendably full. It is a pleasure to read our old essayists in so attractive and scholarly an edition.
Old English Social Life as told ly the Parish
Registers. By T. F. Thiselton Dyer. (Stock.) MB. THISELTON DYER'S name as a worker in the field of antiquarian research is already known to us. In the volume he has just issued he tells the world at large how and in what manner parish registers illustrate the social life of our long-dead ancestors. If the author can make the general public regard parish registers from any other point of view than that of pedigree tracing, he will indeed have accomplished a great work. The view usually taken of these important documents is that for tracing the descent of titles and property they are necessary; but few people realize their great use in showing us one side of the life led in this country during the later Middle Ages. Mr. Thiselton Dyer has succeeded in compiling a very useful book, which by giving extracts from the documents themselves will show to those who could
