The eighth lecture, "On the Practical Study of Gothic Architecture," taken in conjunction with the fourth and fifth, furnishes almost a guide-book in brief to the chief architectural glories of our own country, touching with a master's hand chiefly on details or features which under the mechanical guidance of the ordinary manuals might pass almost unobserved. The remaining nine lectures, in the second volume, delivered after the author's promotion to the professorial chair, are on "Early Architecture in Great Britain," "The_Principle of Vaulting," "The Dome," and "Architectural Art in reference to the Past, the Present, and the Future." Though slightly more technical in character, the method of treatment is such as to invest the subject with interest for all thoughtful readers. As an illustration of the close affinities between the history of the arts and that of political institutions, it is not unworthy of note that just as recent historical research has satisfactorily established the continuity that really binds the modern to the ancient era, so Sir Gilbert, in revising his first lecture, saw fit (pp. 12, 40) to abandon his original notion that Christian architecture was an entirely "new creation," and was willing to admit that in Italy, "in spite of Gothic invasions, &c.," the history of architecture was fairly continuous, and to recognise, inter alia, the existence of a genuine Lombardic style. Of the admirable illustrations contained in, these volumes, which, together with the woodcuts borrowed from Mr. Fergusson's great work, sometimes succeed each other so closely that the text might seem merely the vehicle for their introduction, nearly one-half were executed under the author's own superintendence, and to these, it is almost needless to say, no exception can be taken; some, however, in the second volume, do not appear to have received quite such careful supervision. Those which are the result of the employment of photo-lithography betray the defects as well as the advantages of the method. The illustration which forms the frontispiece of the second volume, for example, taken from the author's splendid design of a Central Hall in the drawings submitted by him for the New Law Courts, is wanting in clearness, shade being represented by mere mist. There are also some typographical inaccuracies which we should not have expected to meet with in volumes of so much merit: "Nôtre Dame" for "Notre Dame" is conspicuous again and again; while such misprints as "Vescica Piscis" are not wanting. Here and there, the addition of a brief note would have added considerably to the interest of the text. For instance, in connection with the slight reference in the fifth lecture (i. 189) to Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, the eminent services since rendered by the lecturer in relation both to the Chapel and the New Court of the College should certainly not have been left unnoticed.

In the Life, Letters, and Sermons of Bishop Herbert de Losinga (2 vols.: London: James Parker & Son) and Canon Perry's Life of St. Hugh of Avalon (London: John Murray) we have two studies of an important era in English history. Herbert de Losinga, who was Bishop of Norwich from the year 1091 to 1119, illustrates the condi tion of affairs under William Rufus and Henry I.; while St. Hugh, who was Bishop of Lincoln from 1186 to 1200, belongs chiefly to the reign of Henry II. and Richard Î, As however Mr. Perry has been at the pains to prefix to his Life of St. Hugh a series of sketches of the Bishop's predecessors in the same illustrious see,-Remigius, Robert Bloet, Alexander, Robert de Chesney, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and Walter of Coutances, his volume, in conjunction with the other two, furnishes an almost continuous narrative from the Norman Conquest to the end of the twelfth century, Of neither the earlier nor the later period can it be said, that it presents a picture in which the brighter tints prevail: in the former we see an episcopal order consisting almost exclusively of aliens imposing a new ritual and novel doctrines on a subject and half-rebellious clergy; in the latter, we find the same episcopate in their turn exposed to oppression and appealing from the absolutism of royalty to the still growing ambition of Rome. The more general features of the times are no better: the evidence, in every direction, brings home to us the demoralization and corruption that prevailed, as faith, society, and political and religious organizations alike, waited for the stirring and renovating influences of the wondrous thirteenth century. Yet, notwithstanding, from whatever point of view we may be disposed to estimate these Norman bishops, it is impossible to deny the importance of their work and the interest that attaches to their history. At a time when the proud race to which they belonged was at once the terror and the admiration of Europe, they are to be found civilizing where the warrior too often only conquered; in England, more especially, quickening the ignorant, apathetic, and semi-brutalized Saxon with humaner thought-winning the sympathies of those whose language they could rarely speak, by noble acts of charity, disinterestedness, and self-sacrifice-rearing

splendid temples, unrivalled as examples of Christian art inspired by the Teutonic genius-manfully confronting the oppressor, mercifully aiding the poor and the friendless-in fine, very striking, not to say surprising, lives, as lived in so corrupt and rude an age.

The claims of Herbert de Losinga to take rank in this class are, however, but slight; and his biographers, although their research may be pronounced exhaustive, still labour under the disadvantage that we really know very little concerning his career-some twenty lines in Florence of Worcester and rather less in Eadmer, together with a brief allusion in the Saxon Chronicle, constituting the only contemporary sources of information respecting him. It is even a matter of doubt whether he belonged to the dominant or to the conquered race, although we know that he received his education at the famous abbey of Fescamp in Normandy. Of this foundation he subsequently became the prior, and from thence, in the year 1087, he was transferred to be abbot of the wealthy Benedictine Monastery at Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. Here he acquired sufficient wealth to enable him, on the see of Thetford falling vacant in 1091, to appeal successfully to the cupidity of William Rufus, and he was accordingly appointed bishop. Judging from the language of the chroniclers, it was one of the most glaring instances of simony that occurred even in that venal reign; the sum which Herbert paid into the royal treasury (£1900) was, in fact, nearly four times as much as Anselm would consent to pay when he succeeded to the see of Canterbury. After his election, however, Herbert exhibited signs of contrition, though whether real or feigned it is difficult to say. It was the time when the English episcopate was seeking to escape from the tyranny of the civil power at home by unreserved recognition of the papal jurisdiction, and the Bishop of Norwich, making his way across the Channel unobserved by the officers of the Red King, laid the insignia of his office at the feet of Urban II. They were graciously restored to him, the contrite bishop was comforted and counselled, and returned to England to transfer his see from the decaying town of Thetford to Norwich, there to found and build the great cathedral of East Anglia. It is the opinion of the editors, in which they are supported by the high authority of the late Professor Willis, that the nave of the edifice is not the work of Herbert, but was added towards the close of the same century. If we adopt this conclusion, our wonder at the vastness of the task accomplished by the first bishop of Norwich will be materially diminished. Otherwise, the admiration expressed by Sir Gilbert Scott (Hist. of Medieval Architecture, ii. 117) that the "stupendous edifice," as he terms it, should have been built and the expenses defrayed within a period of twenty-eight years, is certainly fully justified, especially when we consider that the stone employed had all to be brought from Northamptonshire.

Besides the above facts, we find not much of importance. Herbert appears to have preached at the translation of St. Etheldreda, and was an eye-witness of the miracle at the tomb of St. Witburga; and he was one of Henry's envoys to Rome in 1107 in connection with the all-absorbing question of investitures. Fuller insists emphatically on the reformation in his character. "When old," he says, "nothing of Herbert was in Herbert," a statement hardly borne out by the fact of the bishop's strenuous endeavours to bring under his control the ancient Abbey of St. Edmund's. For this purpose, indeed, he had, when on the above mission to Rome, provided himself with funds in order to gain the papal favour by the same means which had enabled him to gain the royal favour sixteen years before; but falling into the hands of Count Guido, he was mercilessly plundered, and his private designs at Rome were consequently frustrated.

As a writer, it can hardly be said that Bishop Herbert gains much in our estimation. The incidents recorded in his letters are but of trifling importance, and neither the thought nor the diction is suggestive of a mind of very superior vigour or culture. He appears to have been a rigid disciplinarian; and although his own wealth as Abbot of Ramsey had been acquired in glaring disregard of the Benedictine rule, we nevertheless find him (i. 139) severely censuring a poor monk who had ventured to accept some slight remuneration for services rendered as a copyist. The sermons, though not unfavourable specimens of the cloudy and meretricious rhetoric of the period, are full of forced conceits in the application of Scripture, and give evidence of no superiority to the prevailing superstition.

In Hugh of Avalon we have a very different character, and one with respect to whom our information is ample if not complete. Born of a noble family at Avalon in Burgundy, and educated in a house of regular canons at Villarbenoit, he subsequently embraced the monastic profession at the Great Chartreuse. From thence the fame which he acquired by his sanctity, and singular power (which he

appears to have retained through life) of controlling his fellow-men, reached to England, and from the Great Chartreuse he was summoned by Henry II. to preside over a newly founded monastery at Witham in Somersetshire. Hugh is said to have strikingly resembled Henry in person, and it is certain that he soon acquired the monarch's special regard. In a few years more, the humble prior, foreigner though he was, was promoted from his tranquil obscurity at Witham to rule the great see of Lincoln. His nomination by Henry appears to have filled the ecclesiastical world with astonishment, and none more than the canons themselves on whom it devolved to elect him. Enthroned at Lincoln, Hugh's rare qualities of mind and temper found for the first time full scope. Ignorant of the native speech and customs, he applied to Archbishop Baldwin for certain discreet and learned clerks to assist him in his work. Though indebted for his promotion almost solely to Henry's favour, one of his first acts was resolutely to oppose the cruel forest laws, and in the discharge of this duty he had the courage to retort upon the insolence of the King's chief forester by a sentence of excommunication. Pressed to confer a prebend on a Court favourite, he evaded the demand with a tact and firmness which Henry, though at first incensed, rewarded by new marks of favour. His keenness of discernment and rigid impartiality caused his episcopal court to be thronged with anxious suitors for justice-although, to quote Mr. Perry's words, "he loved better to be cleaning the scuttles at Witham than to be taking his place in the Curia Regis." He sustained the reputation of the whole Anglican order by the steadiness of his refusal to put into execution Pope Celestine's sentence of excommunication against Geoffrey, Archbishop of York. In an age when genuine morality was held of slight account, and, again to quote our author, "nothing was very highly esteemed save a senseless and excessive asceticism," he could venture to constrain a priest on whom the duties of his office pressed heavily to break his fast before the celebration of the Eucharist. The contrast between these two twelfth-century studies is complete. The editors of the one have presented us with two bulky octavos, the greater part of which must be pronounced almost worthless the compiler of the other gives us a modest duodecimo, nearly every page of which is valuable. As Bishop Herbert strikes us as neither better nor worse than his age, so St. Hugh appears in almost every respect superior to it. Where the one gained the royal favour by unblushing simony, the other commanded it by heroic resistance to the royal extortion. The one sought to humble the monastic order by counter-plotting them; the other was content to remind his hearers that "God did not require of any man to have been a monk or a hermit, but to have been truly a Christian." While the one hung over the relics of saints and recounted wondrous miracles, the other, according to the author of the Magna Vita, was wont to refer these things to the desire felt by the narrators of commending the person to whom they were attributed, and to the profit likely to arise to those who admired such things; but for himself, the holiness of the saints was a sufficient miracle for him, and a sufficient example. The one universal miracle which was ever present to his mind was the remembrance of his Creator, and the thought of the stupendous multitude and inexplicable greatness of His mighty works."

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In one respect, however, it must be allowed that Dean Goulburn and his coadjutor have much the advantage of Canon Perry. They have given us two excellent indexes, while he has given us none whatever. We hope that in a second edition, which his volume is almost certain to reach, this deficiency will be made good.

Mr. Reeve's volume on Petrarch in the series under the editorship of Mrs. Oliphant (Foreign Classics for English Readers. London: W. Blackwood & Sons) has the merit of setting forth very simply and clearly the main incidents in the poet's career and the chief characteristics of his genius. The compiler frankly states that his impressions with respect to Petrarch are derived rather from early than recent research; and although he has availed himself of the valuable edition of the Epistles by Fracassetti, he does not appear to have consulted the elegant study of his subject by M. Mezières, published in 1868, nor the far more valuable criticism contained in Dr. Georg Voigt's well-known volume Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, &c. Hence his general estimate of the great Florentine is rather concerned with the sonneteer than with the scholar whose example and influence opened up the way to the Renaissance. Hallam's observations on Petrarch's Latin style, quoted on page 78, certainly appear very meagre and insufficient when compared with the valuable criticism in Voigt's volume (pp. 20, 21). As regards the details of Petrarch's life, the writer should not, we think, have omitted the highly characteristic event told by the poet himself (Epist. Rer.

Sen. xv. 1) of his father's consigning to the flames the little collection of classical authors which the son had acquired at Montpellier, in order that his attention might not be distracted from the study of the civil law. It is not quite correct to say that Petrarch's father left him "nothing but a very choice copy of some of the works of Cicero." There was a small property for him and his brother, though, as M. Mezières says, it was "très mince." It is somewhat singular that the title of Petrarch's treatise (perhaps the best known of all) de sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia, to which reference is made at three distinct places (pp. 3, 62, 123), should each time have been differently translated, the last version, “On the ignorance of himself and others," being certainly wrong.

ཡ

A very different treatment of a similar subject is presented to our notice in M. Vast's elaborate study, Le Cardinal Bessarion (Paris: Hachette & Co.). Bessarion (born in 1403) was a native of Trebizond, the capital of that new empire which was at this period reaping the fruits of its heroic resistance to the Turk and the Mongol, and enjoying, in the opinion of Mr. Finlay, an amount of tranquillity and prosperity which might compare favourably with that of any European state. Amid the peaceful industry and commercial activity of this thriving city Bessarion received his early education, and grew up to manhood; from thence, about the year 1425, he repaired to Constantinople. M. Vast considers, not without reason, that the polity and civilization of the Byzantine Empire have been unduly depreciated, and he notes with satisfaction the indications afforded in works like those of MM. Egger, Miller, and Bruet de Prasles, and the recent essay of M. Rambaud on Constantine Porphyrogenitus, that these prejudices are already on the wane. It is in this spirit that he has composed his present work. Bessarion, he holds, typifies, better than any other man of his age, that fusion of the Greek and the Latin genius which resulted in the Renaissance. "He was," he says, "a monk of the order of St. Basil, transplanted into the Sacred College, a cardinal who protected scholars, a scholastic theologian who broke lances in the defence of Platonism, a zealous worshipper of antiquity, who contributed in an unequalled degree to bring about the modern era." The relation under which Bessarion is best known to posterity is that of mediator between the Eastern and Western Churches at the Council of Florence. The feelings with which his abortive success on that memorable Loccasion was hailed at Constantinople are familiar to students of Church History: as M. Vast pithily expresses it, the cry was, "Plutôt le turban des Turcs que la mitre du Pape!" The details of the proceedings of the Council, as also those of the Council of Ferrara, are given by him at considerable length and with great care. Not less so are those which belong to the equally laborious and equally fruitless efforts of the patriotic Cardinal to organize another crusade. Most readers, however, will probably turn with far more interest to the fifth book, which is concerned with Bessarion's relations to the Renaissance. His life during his literary retirement at Tusculum (where he held the bishopric), and the Academy of which he was there the centre, composed of scholars from all quarters whom he aided and encouraged with the liberality of a Mæcenas,-the library of St. Mark at Venice that he founded, the warm controversies between the Aristotelians and the rising school of the Platonists, in which he took a foremost part, all make up an episode in the history of the learning of this period which will receive the more attention from the fact that it has been but imperfectly described by those English writers who, like Mr. Symonds, have treated of the subject. To many it will probably appear that M. Vast has somewhat overrated the importance and extent of Bessarion's influence, but his work is evidently the result of lengthened and careful study of both the original sources and recent writers, and it will be admitted to be not only attractive in style but also scholarly and in some respects profound. »

སྙེ་མ ༢

In Stories from Early English Literature, by Sarah J. Venables Dodds (London: Griffith & Farran), we have an attempt to bring within the comprehension of very young students some of the more important characters and features of our medieval literature. The design is conceived in a genial spirit, and the language and treatment are certainly as simple as the subject admits. It is, however, at least open to question whether it would not be better to postpone any attempt to impart such knowledge until it has become unnecessary to present it in so highly diluted a form. As young memories are very tenacious it is desirable that they should not be taught anything which they may afterwards have to unlearn; as, for example, that Charlemagne was a giant "much over six feet," and that the famous school which he instituted was at Paris.

I

III. SCIENCE.

(Under the Direction of R. A. PROCTOR, B.A.)

HAD occasion to discuss two years ago in these pages, Professor Draper's recognition of the bright lines of oxygen in the spectrum of the sun. Although several physicists, whose opinion I could not lightly disregard, were of opinion that I had been over-hasty in regarding their evidence as conclusive, I did not hesitate to republish that essay in my " Pleasant Ways in Science," because I could not, after carefully examining the evidence, perceive any good grounds for questioning the validity of Professor Draper's conclusions. In eighteen cases, well-marked agreement was shown between oxygen bright lines and bright parts of the solar spectrum; in no case was there any recognisable discordance. It appeared to me that under such circumstances no reasonable doubt could remain. If such evidence as this was rejected, no evidence whatever could suffice to demonstrate the existence of a known element in the sun. It appeared to me further that some of the doubts urged by those who declined to accept Professor Draper's conclusions were urged without due consideration of the nature of the evidence he had adduced. Some said, for example, that the bright lines or bands in the solar spectrum, which he identified with oxygen bright bands, were unlike the bands seen in the spectrum of oxygen. But what else was to be expected when we remembered that the spectrum of oxygen was photographed after the light from the glowing oxygen and nitrogen (that is, from the electric spark through air) had passed through only a few feet of air, whereas the light from the glowing oxygen in the sun had passed probably through more than 10,000 miles of dense vaporous matter in the sun, to say nothing of 100 miles or so of vapour-laden air upon the earth. Again it was said that Professor Draper's instruments did not produce a dispersion sufficient to make the coincidences certain; yet they were more powerful than those used in the classical researches of Kirchhoff and Bunsen. Others again objected that no element in the sun could possibly indicate its presence by bright lines, forgetting apparently that at times hydrogen certainly does this, in the sun's case; while in the case of the stars Gamma Cassiopeia, and others, hydrogen persistently indicates its presence in this way and no other. However, Professor Draper, though he recognised the just answers to these and other objections, possessed too much of the true scientific spirit to let the matter rest thus. He increased the dispersive power of his spectroscopic battery fourfold. He purified the spectrum of atmospheric oxygen by restraining the electric spark from its customary zigzag wanderings (making it travel between two plates of soapstone), and directing the plane of its motion towards the slit of the spectroscope. And lastly, he varied the conditions under which he took his photographic spectra. After all these precautions had been taken, the coincidences were found not only to be not impaired, but to be rendered more strikingly obvious. It appears to me that under these circumstances, Professor Draper is abundantly justified in taking up the position that the balance of probabilities is strongly in favour of the existence of oxygen in the sun. The burden of disproof now rests with those who reject his evidence. If oxygen does not exist in the sun, let them photograph, or even indicate any part of the spectrum of the sun showing one of those discordances which in that case must exist. Until they have done so, the direct positive evidence obtained by Professor Draper must be regarded as convincing. It may be mentioned, in conclusion, as showing how laborious such researches are, that, in obtaining his photographs during the last three years, Professor Draper has required twenty millions of electric flashes. Although only two drops of petroleum are used to produce each revolution of the gramme machine (one spark for each revolution), 150 gallons of petroleum have already been consumed. He has been largely aided in his researches by Mrs. Draper, and it was hoped she would have accompanied him when he presented an account of his labours to the Royal Astronomical Society. But in this matter British conservatism prevailed, as it usually does in such cases.

In his treatise on the Art of Scientific Discovery (London: Longman, Green & Co.), Mr. G. Gore has described the nature of original scientific research, the chief personal conditions of success in its pursuit, the general methods by which discoveries are made in physics and chemistry, and the chief causes of failure. Mr. Gore remarks that "to some the very proposal to write a book on such a subject may appear presumptuous," chiefly because of the difficulty of communicating methods of discovery a difficulty which he recognises, but considers not insuperable, It appears to me that whatever presumption there may be, resides in the attempt to present a subject so wide in the compass of so small a volume as Mr. Gore has written. As he