A History of the Venerable English College, Rome. By Cardinal
Gasquet. (Longmans. 15s. net.)—Cardinal Gasquet's scholarly book covers a long period of history, for the English College, founded in 1579, grew out of a fourteenth-century English Hospice, and that again provided for the needs of an English colony which dated from the conversion of England in the seventh century. Legend says that Ina, King of the West Saxons, when he resigned his crown in 725 and went to Rome founded a " Schola Anglorum," and in the ninth century there was a regular English quarter known as the " Borgo," which was destroyed by fire in 817. The author deals fully and frankly with the controversy over the sixteenth-century College, which soon passed under the control of the Jesuits and remained in their charge until the Order was suppressed in 1773. The College was closed and sacked in 1798, when the French occupied Rome, but its mediaeval archives were concealed by friendly hands and restored when the institution was reopened under an English Rector in 1818. Cardinal Wiseman was one of the first students of the new era.
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