thinks” some absurdity or other, the reference is usually to the work of a novice, often dating nearly twenty years back, and sometimes manifestly at variance with more recent information even if not specifically withdrawn.
But I would not part from Dr. Chambers on a note of complaint. His volumes are a pleasure to read and a joy to use (when cross-reference is not needed!), and they place the subject of the Elizabethan Stage upon an entirely new footing. We must one and all take off our hats to the wealth of his knowledge and his manner of imparting it.
The need of an illustrated handbook to society and life in the English Middle Age is felt by the student of literature as keenly as by the professed historian. This new and reorganised edition of Dr. Barnard’s useful volume will be hailed with considerable pleasure by both. It is a beautifully produced work. A good deal of the illustration, particularly the architectural diagrams in the first chapter, it would be hard to better; most of the new work, on ecclesiastical building and organisation, on mediæval handwriting and printing, on coinage, is of manifest distinction; and the price for such good things is reasonable. As a selection, confessedly not, as a synthesis, of English mediæval antiquities the book will be abundantly helpful.
Even granted that the book is a companion, it might have been advisable, in view of the new material added, to arrange the order of the chapters rather differently from that in which they now stand. After chapters on Ecclesiastical and Domestic Architecture (I. and II.), War (Military Architecture and the Art of War, III.), Civil and Military Costume (IV. and V.), Heraldry (VI.), and Shipping (VII.), come two on Town Life (VIIL) and Country Life (IX.) by the late Miss Toulmin Smith and the late Mr. George Townsend Warner respectively; then follow long subdivided chapters on the Monks, the Friars, and the Secular Clergy (X.), and on Learning and Education (XI.),
