Froissart in Britain. By Henry Newbolt. (Nisbet and Co. 2s.
6d. net.)—Mr. Newbolt expresses a feeling familiar to most of us when he says that as a boy in turning over Froissart's pages "he stayed longer when he came upon England and the Englishmen." When the scene is laid abroad there is something perplexing in the story. The Angevin and Gascon knights who fight for the English King bear a very strong resemblance to the knights who fitht for the French. Sometimes they change sides : in any case, it is a tax upon the memory to keep them apart. And the localities are strange; nor are we greatly concerned about the issue, except when some event of capital importance is going on. In the English persons and things we have a more lively and understanding interest. The Douglas and the Percys, King Edward HI. and the Countess of Salisbury, Wat Tyler, Sir William Walworth, Richard IL, so brave and yet so weak, the crafty Henry of Bolingbroke, who knows how to turn his misfortunes to good account—all these stand out in vivid colours before us. Otter- bourn, Nevill's Cross, Smithfield, are places in which we feel our- selves at home. Mr. Newbolt has taken Lord Berners's translation for his extracts, modernising the spelling. The illustrations, if not exactly contemporary, are not far from being so.
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