solution of the vexed question of the correct interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric in the Book of Common Prayer. The 'Interpritations have been known to students in different and generally imperfect forms since the time of Strype; but Mr. Kennedy has been able to produce what will generally be accepted as the authoritative version, based as it is on a careful examination of sounds. Mr. Kennedy in his introduction treats the document as evidence of 'a wider policy' on the part of the bishops, and as the earliest attempt on their part to dispense with some of the legal ceremonial requirements rather than alienate the vast majority of the clergy.' He has satisfied himself that the ceremonial compromise erected by the document was in some cases effectual.' The subject is a thorny one, and the document is open to widely differing interpretations, but all students of the period are indebted to Mr. Kennedy for the production of a complete text for the first time. DAVID BAIRD SMITH.

To the Clarendon Press we are indebted for a very pretty reprint of Galt's Annals of the Parish (pp. xxiv, 216; with frontispiece, 2s. 6d. nett), to which Mr. G. S. Gordon, of Magdalen College, has contributed an interesting introduction. We are inclined, however, to think that Mr. Gordon underestimates the interest taken in Galt when he says that the present generation knows nothing about him.'

The English County History movement for schools already noticed in Mr. E. A. Greening Lamborn's little story-volume on Berkshire (S.H.R. vi. 213) is carried further by the same author's School History of Berkshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, 8vo, pp. 256, with 61 illustrations, price Is. 6d.), which is a bright, popular sketch. Its illustrations, the work of the author's pupils, are distinctively architectural, and the work shows kindred sympathies. In the notice of Windsor the error, corrected by Mr. J. T. T. Brown, as to King James I.'s prison being Windsor is repeated. The Kingis Quair may have been in some degree a historical romance of Berkshire, but Mr. Lamborn is clearly wrong in supposing that the royal author was continuously a prisoner at Windsor. Berkshire annals are full of spirit, and a spirited interpreter of them, like Mr. Lamborn, may well make the schoolboy's task of study a patriotic pleasure.

The English Historical Review sustains a level of excellence which is beyond the reach of envy, and is chiefly due to its cultivation of studies at first-hand by specialist authorities and to its constancy of textual contributions. The January number shows its customary catholicity, covering themes so widely apart as the campaign of A.D. 324 between Constantine and Licinius, which determined the fortunes of the Empire and made Europe Christendom, the Counter-Reformation in Germany as illustrated in the career (1521-69) of the Jesuit Petrus Canisius, the economic causes of the Scottish Union, and the British relations with Napoleon in 1802. Dr. Figgis draws from the memorials of the suave and able Canisius a spirited sketch of the clerical, social and political conditions prevalent

between the classes which made the long debate and struggle of the Reformation, especially the students and controversialists of the time. Numerous citations from his utterances are lively and pregnant reflections of a disputatious age. Miss Theodora Keith, in tracing the influence of trading relationships upon policy in England and Scotland, appears to advantage in a field to which some of her studies in our own columns have served a useful purpose of introduction. Her present essay emphasises the direct force of the economic cross purposes, combined with the question of the succession, as the compelling elements of the Union. In a paper on an Italian rendering of Tito Livio's Vita Henrici Quinti, Mr. Hamilton Wylie by printing several pages of the Italian MS. text gives the proof that the translator worked from Tito Livio's original, not from the expanded narrative attributed to Thomas Elmham. The latter work Mr. Wylie inclines to regard as only a version of the life by Tito Livio 'expanded and embellished by himself."

The Genealogist (Oct.) among its pedigree records, which are many and serviceable, with heraldic plates, prints a Roll of Arms of 1673.

The Devonshire church of Branscombe and the Sussex manor house of Cowdray are chief themes of the Reliquary for January. Its illustrations comprise fine bits of early pottery.

The Ulster Journal of Archaeology (May-Nov.) collects an endless variety of provincial memorials, and illustrates many of them. The high cross of Drumgolan, the heraldry of Clonoe churchyard, the crossslabs in the Franciscan friary at Doe Castle and at Dunsford Protestant Church, the records and insignia of Irish volunteers, the O'Neill Castle at Seafin, and the round church of Carrickfergus Castle, supply pictures and text as interesting as the portraits and biographies of Ulster notables of whom the poets and harpers are a genus by themselves. Andrew Craig, Presbyterian minister of Lisburn, wrote an autobiography in or about 1787, and the frontispiece of the May-August number reproduces an original drawing by him of Glasgow University circa 1790, showing the interior of the quadrangle, with gowned figures promenading the flagstones, and giving a peep through the archway under the clock-tower to High Street. By permission of Messrs. Davidson and M'Cormack we reproduce this.

Several papers in the January number of the American Historical Review concern European subjects. One of these by G. Seeliger takes up a vital side of feudalism in an attempt to ascertain the relations between seignorial authority and the state in early German history. He dismisses the proposition that seignorial authority was the true cradle of German territorialism, and that out of it the German states were developed. He denies that the German town grew out of seignorial institutions concerning agriculture, holds that the empire formed the German state, which was never broken up into the dominions of private lords, as

Germany was never fully feudalised, and arrives at the major conclusion that all the essential elements of corporate and communal power originated in the empire, and are imperial powers transferred to local spheres. But these opinions are provokingly theoretical and unconvincing. Another essay, very different, by Prof. Alex. Bugge, deals with the origin and credibility of the Icelandic Saga. He asserts that the saga developed in the Viking settlements on the British Isles earlier than it did in Norway or in Iceland. The first saga to arise concerning a Norwegian king was the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason who fell in the year 1000. A saga of him was narrated in England in the eleventh century. Olaf was, according to Prof. Bugge, confounded with another Olaf, the Northumbrian king, known by the Celtic name Cuaran. He fought at Brunanburh in 937, and has been regarded as the prototype of Havelok the Dane (S.H.R. i. 446). Mr. Bugge is to discuss the entire question in a Year-book of Northern Antiquities, after which Prof. Skeat and Prof. Gollancz may have a word to say about the interesting romancepedigree.

A statement that Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum 'is full of Viking stories,' and that Geoffrey was quoting from an Irish saga on the battle of Clontarf when describing the fight of the armies of Brennius and Belinus, is hardly established by the citations made. The armies met near a forest named Calaterium, says Geoffrey (iii. 3), and their cohorts fell like corn before the reapers." The same phrase is used in an Irish saga about the fall of the warriors in the forest at Clontarf in the battle of 1014, and the Irish saga connects with an ancient Norse saga of King Brian. There is bold, ingenious and not unpersuasive speculation in thus equating King Brennius with King Brian Boru, the forest and battlefield of Calaterium on the sea coast with the forest and battlefield of Clontarf, near Dublin, the harvest-like fall of Norwegians and Britons with the slaughter-as when a great host are reaping a field' of Danes and Irish in 1014, and the final flight of the defeated Brennius and his Norwegians to their ships pursued by Belinus to the flight of the defeated Danes pursued by the victorious troops of Brian Boru. But it is a very far cry, and before believing one would fain seek further and better grounds of faith.

The Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1906 (vol. i. pp. 454, vol. ii. pp. 572, Washington Government Printing Office, 1908), although naturally taken up chiefly with material of American history, displays at once the catholicity of research and the energetic prosecution of study abroad as well as at home. Indian Consolidation and the Civil War are native themes discussed, and the whole of the second volume is devoted to reports on the public and local archives of various states. Several papers deal with phases of British history prior to the Declaration of Independence. Miss Susan M. Kingsbury compares the Virginia Company, organized in 1609, with the English trading companies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and shows the concern not only as a trading company but also as a vital part of the general