AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF IRONWORK. With an Historical Introduction by Otto
Hoever. (Ernest Benn. 42s.)—The average man secs so few finely wrought gates and grilles and chandeliers nowadays that he scarcely realizes tile artistic possibilities of iron unless he goes into the Victoria and Albert Museum or visits Innsbriick or Nancy or some other of the small old cities that were once princely capitals. This new picture-book, hardly to he styled an encyclopaedia, contains hundreds of good photo- graphs of European ironwork, arranged chronologically, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. It is most interesting to turn over the pages, with the changing fashions 'from grave to gay, from lively to severe, and to observe how national character reveals itself in the art of the s nith as in every other art--as witness the delicacy a French eighteenth-century work, the stern massiveness of Spanish gates, and the excessively laboured craftsmanship of the German baroque smithing. Mr. Hoever's Introduction, filling only some twenty pages, is good as far as it goes, but might with advantage have been extended. The book is a useful addition to the few good English works on the subject.
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