Monastic Life in the Middle Ages. By Cardinal Gasquct. (Bell.
8s. 6d. net.)—Cardinal Gasquet has collected in this volume a number of stray essays, on mediaeval St. Albans, St. Augustine's, Canterbury, just before the Reformation, a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1506, Roger Bacon and the Vulgate, Polydoro Vergil's history of Henry VII., and other topics, with a lengthy paper on the relations between Great Britain and the Vatican during and after the French Revolution. An essay written as long ago as 1883 on " Adrian IV. and Ireland" maintains that the Bull of 1159, by which the only Pope of English birth granted to Henry II. the sovereignty of Ireland, was almost certainly a forgery. It is perhaps worth while to point out that this ancient controversy does not stand where it did forty years ago. Cardinal Gasquet may find in the Catholic Encyclopaedia convincing proof of the genuineness of the Bull " Laudabiliter," the text of which is given in the " Book of Leinster," an Irish manuscript written before 1171. The Irish Roman Catholic author of the Encyclopaedia article says that " there is not in my judgment any controverted matter in history about which the evidence preponderates in favour of our view so decisively as about the Donation of Adrian."
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