The House of Austria during the Thirty Years' War. Two
Lectures by Adolphus W. Ward, M.A. (Macmillan.)—The lectures, crowded as they are with the results of wide research and bold original thought, could hardly, we should say, have been fully understood by any audience ; the boolc is very valuable and interesting. There is, to mention ono of many things, a specially striking passage about the real character and designs of Wallenstein, especially about the scheme which was implied in his title, seemingly so absurd, "General of the Oceanic and Baltic Seas," a scheme which aimed at nothing less, Mr. Ward thinks, than "the rain of the trade of the United Provinces and of England by the revival of the glories of the German Hansa under the Imperial Protectorate," and which was crushed at its beginning by Wallenstein's failure in the siege of Stralsund. Mr. Ward's weak point is his style, which is cor- rupted, one would think, by too much knowledge of German. Thus he speaks of the small German princes identifying "the unsolidation of their territorial autonomy with the national cause."
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