Bristol, Past and Present. By T. F. Nicholls, F.S.A., and
John Taylor. Vol. I., Civil History ; Vol. II., Ecclesiastical History. (J. W. Arrowsmith, Bristol ; Griffith and Ferran, London.)—These two handsome volumes deserve a more extended and more particular notice than we can give them. We are not in a position to test the accuracy of the information given, but that it has been laboriously collected is manifest, and that it has been well and skilfully arranged we can testify, on the strength of the interest with which we have read the book. We notice a blemish here and there. "The Emperor Brittannicus, A.D. 49," is an unfamiliar personage, though the son of Claudius certainly had the title,—spelt, by the way, with a single t. The account of the grammar-school is very meagre, limited, as far as we have been able to dim:over, to a notice of its foundation. But there is a vast amount of interesting matter. We may notice the account of the Roman customs surviving in Bristol, a collection of facts which have an important bearing on the disputed question of the extermina- tion of the Roman-British population by the Saxon invaders. The two volumes have a handsome exterior, and are copiously adorned with carefully-executed illustrations.
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