THE HISTORY OF THE FRANKS. By Gregory of Tours. Translated
with an Introduction by 0. M. Dalton. (Clarendon Press. 2 Vols., 40s.)—The learned Keeper of the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum has rendered a service to students of early French history by producing this scholarly version—the first in English that is complete—of Bishop Gregory's account of his own times, with an elaborate introduction and notes. The Merovingians, the rulers of the barbarous Franks who had submerged the old Roman civilization of Gaul, were terrible people, and the Bishop portrays them most vividly. Two women surpass the men in savagery. Brunhild of Austrasia and Fredegund of Neustria, well matched in craft and cruelty, make the book exciting with their relentless feud. The wonder is that, in the welter of blood and tears whicn we call the Merovingian period, any kind of ordered life survived. Even the Church was not respected, though Gregory himself contrived to hold his own. Mr. Dalton compares his dramatic book with that of our later and sterner Bede. The two historians have no rivals in what is left to us of the literature of the dark ages of Western Europe.
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