mantles and robes of silk, in the pages of a court poet will, we apprehend, count for very little, especially as the sufferers do not appear to have solaced themselves with reflections on the sure effects of the recurring seasons.  Deschamps himself was unable, it seems, to get his pension paid; and if he died, as Mr. Besant tells us, about 1409, the chances, we think, are that however he may have denounced luxury as the “crying evil” of his time, his death was the result of starvation.

Mr. Besant, it will be perceived, is one of those writers who indulge in haphazard assertions without troubling their heads with the facts that conflict with them.  A glaring instance of his tendency to exaggeration and wild speculation will be found in his estimate of Rabelais, whom he first vaunts as “a great moral teacher,” “a teacher the like of whom Europe had not yet seen,” and then denounces as having “destroyed effectually, perhaps for centuries yet to come, earnestness in France,” declaring that “no writer who ever lived has inflicted such lasting injury on his country,” and that “it would have been better for France if his book, tied to a millstone, had been hurled into the sea.”  These opinions are contradictory of each other, since it is impossible that a writer who so perverted men’s minds should also have been, in any proper sense of the term, a great moral teacher; they are inconsistent with Mr. Besant’s account of the “unbroken lines of writers,” of whom Rabelais was one, but not the first, all having the same characteristics, all “irreverent,” having “no strong convictions,” “like children for mockery, mischief and lightness of heart;” and finally, they are so improbable in themselves, and so unsusceptible of proof, that, uttered as they are with the solemnity of communications from an unseen world, they produce much the same impression on us as the disclosures with which Mr. Robert Dale Owen is favored by his “materialized” visitants.

We might cite other examples to prove that Mr. Besant is not a safe guide either in his general speculations or in his critical judgments.  He is an agreeable narrator, showing a close familiarity with the topics he handles, and an enthusiasm which, if it sometimes degenerates into mere fume, adds on the whole to the liveliness of his writing.  His translations in verse are remarkable for their ease and finish.  The book may be read with pleasure, but not, we fear, with equal profit.  The chapters that deal with the least known works and writers are the most satisfactory.  On Montaigne and Moliere Mr. Besant has nothing to say which is likely to incite the reader to a fresh study of their works, which ought to be the effect of every fresh discourse on a great author.

* * * * *

Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland A.D. 1803. 
  By Dorothy Wordsworth. 
  Edited by J.C.  Shairp, LL.D. 
  New York:  G.P.  Putnam’s Sons.