Uyiie : Council of Constance 549 on that close study of the early fifteenth century which has fruited in the successive volumes of his History of England um/cr Henry the Fourth ; and the breadth of view which saw England's history in every larger interest she shared with Christendom; giving us luminous chapters on Timur the Tartar and on the wars in Pruce, led him, above all, to trace the fortunes of the Latin Church. Nowhere perhaps in English have we so vivid portrayal as in his pages of the confusion wrought by the Creat Schism, of the futile efforts at union, of the Pisan Council, of the fer- ment at Prague. But just here, in 1413, on the very threshold of the great gathering at Constance, the death of Henry brought his pen to a pause. It was a happy inspiration, born of a like breadth of view, which moved those who choose for Oxford a Ford lecturer on English history to win from him this supplement. The six lectures deal respectively with " Sigismund," the council's author ; with " Constance," its scene ; with the make-up and the beginning of "The Council" itself; with the "Deposition" of Pope John; with "John Hus — his "Trial" and his " Death." To these, as a " Preliminary," the lecturer now adds a chatty enumeration of his sources, and at their close, as " L' Envoi," a word to the critics who have accused him of over-minuteness and of a want of literary style. If Mr. Wylie's pages have no style, so much the worse for style. They have what is better — charm. Unlike enough is his gossipy, gallop- ing story, reeking with the very smell and savor of the time it tells of, to the stately chapters in which the lamented Bishop Creighton has given us our other notable English account of the great Council ; and those who wish all their history after a single model will hardly approve Mr. Wylie's. But to those who love individuality for its own sake, and es- pecially if they like their history in the concrete, what was ever more companionable ? Minute Mr. Wylie is ; but all his details are significant. It is his sources which speak ; and to every phrase and epithet of these new pages, despite their lack of learned Apparat, there has gone the same wealth of research which burdened with foot-notes his old. And while his fondness for archaisms, which gave such umbrage to the critics of his Henry IF., here betrays itself only occasionally in quaint word or turn of phrase, the racy, devil-may-care Saxon of even his loosest para- graphs makes the English heart within one bound with glee. Yet the history of the Council is but half told. By July of 141 5, where he breaks off, schism was scotched and heresy singed ; but reform was yet to grapple with. May he give us soon the rest of the story — whether as lectures like these or as chapters of an England under Henry V. George Lincoln Burr. The Reformation. By Williston Walker. [Ten Epochs of Church History.] ( New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1900. Pp. X, 478.) In attempting to give in four hundred pages a sketch of the Reforma- tion movement from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to the close
