Minor Notices 167 In general, then, the author's plan is admirable and his matter trust- worthy. His literary presentation is more unequal. The habit of in- serting quotations from other modern writers into the body of the te.t, indulged in somewhat excessively by Professor Riggs, while it testifies to the modesty of the author, weakens confidence in his independence of thinking and breaks the unity of the presentation. He seems to have warmed to his work but slowly. The story of the beginnings of the Maccabean struggle is almost tame. The treatment of Herod's reign is stronger, in matter and manner as good as anything written on the sub- ject. In the episode of Jerusalem's last days the author rises to some- thing like stirring description. The passage is the climax of the book. A series of appendices containing genealogical tables and critical and archaeological material adds to the value of the work. There are fur- nished also an excellent historical chart, three good maps, references and full indexes. A History of Spain from tiic Earliest Times to the Death of Ferdinand tlie Catholic, by Ulick Ralph Burke, M.A. Second edition, edited, with additional notes and an introduction, by Martin A. S. Hume. (Long- mans, 1900, two vols., pp. xxxi, 416, viii, 3S3.) In 1S95 Mr. Burke, after "four happy years of varied research," published his history of medieval Spain. The author's untimely death having prevented a revi- sion of the work at his hands, this task has been undertaken by Major Hume, the well-known editor of the Calendars of Spanish State Papers. The changes in the new edition consist of a slight rearrangement of the order of the chapters, the correction of obvious errors of statement in the text, and the addition of a number of brief footnotes "where the informa- tion seemed to need qualification, explanation or supplement." The edi- tor has also added a preface in which he develops the view that, owing to geographical and ethnological considerations and the comparative slowness of national development in Spain, its history, ," better than that of any other European country, enables the philosophical historian to trace the concatenation of causes and effects in the life of a nation," and thus demonstrate the scientific basis of his teaching. In the republication a more attractive external form has also been chosen. These alterations were all desirable, and as Mr. Burke's volumes must serve for the present as the best presentation of the subject in English, any improvement in them should be welcomed. At the same time it must be pointed out that the most serious defects of the original work are still untouched. The narrative is as uneven and scrappy as ever, it gives the same impression of half-assimilated learning, it still lacks unity and flow. There is the same reliance on writers like Sismondi and Fleury and Montalembert, the same insular regard for what Englishmen may have said on the subject, the same neglect of important modern monographs, and, what is more remarkable, of the two most considerable recent works on the general history of the period — the Geschichte von Spanien of Schafer and Schirr- macher and the Historia General de Espana issued by the Royal Acad- emy of History. Charles H. Haskins.
