The Good St. Louis and his Time. By Mrs. Bray.
(Griffith and Ferran.) —Unpretending as the preface to this Life of St. Louis appears, we con- sider that the work carries out its purpose most effectually, and helps materially to fill up tho important gap hitherto existing between Mrs. Markham's Ifistwy of France and the advanced works of Sismondi and Guizot, of Hann and Hallam. Mrs. Bray's pen is as ready now as when upwards of forty years ago she delighted everyone with her romances of White Hoods and Dc Foir, and though in her eightieth year, she writes as well and as accurately as over. Moreover, it is refreshing to meet with this good, straightforward writing of a past generation unaffected by modern style and modern ideas, and unconscious of its own power. Mrs. Bray is quite at home with her subject, and clover in her handling and arrange- ment of events. With all the well-known authorities at hand for reference, and looking to Joinville and Matthew Paris for con- stant supplies, she has furnished us with a valuable and interesting record of Louis's reign. From those chroniclers she has frequently borrowed for quotation, and it is curious to observe that, in a short Life of St. Louis by Guizot, published last January, and when Mrs. Bray's book was in the printer's hands, both writers have repeatedly selected the same passages and the same incidents for illustration, and it is satis- factory to find that both should have boon so entirely of one mind in their portraiture of the French monarch. We recommend Mrs. Bray's book with confidence to all readers ; it is an accurate, well-connected biography, abounding in anecdote and full of the romance of Eastern warfare. Her judgment of the important affairs in which Louis was concerned is clear and impartial ; everything was clouded in the thirteenth century more or less by the fanaticism that all, from the king downwards, mistook for religion, but we agree with Mrs. Bray that the errors and faults of St. Louis were rather those " of his age and his Church than of the man."
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