MODERN FRANCE.
Modern France is a companion volume to Medieval France. To help him tell his "story of the life of a great nation," Mr. They has gathered about him an elite of specialists whose names are well known to any student of French. He has lent to them his own talent of being learned, brief, and readable at the same time. Each aims—and on the whole with great success—at calling forth a clear picture of the period with which he is dealing and bringing its salient features into prominence by omitting details of no special significance.
Messrs. E. Bourgeois and A. Aulard are responsible for the most of the relatively long chapter on History. In chapters subsidiary to it appear, for the first time, complete historical sketches of the Army and Navy. M. Ph. Sagnac, who com- piled the first volume on the Revolution in the Lavissc Histoire de la France Contemporaine, then gives an exceedingly inter- esting and able description of Economic and Social Life. this comprehensive survey is the more notable in that the materials for it had to be gathered mostly from the original documents. Mr. G. B. Perrett depicts concisely the folly and viciousness of the finance system of the Ancien Regime, which contributed so largely to the disaster of 1789. M. de Lapradelle, like Messrs. Aulard and Bourgeois, a professor in the University of Paris, shows the Law of the Old Order brought out of confusion by Napoleon, whose Civil Code is the framework of the legal structure of to-day. Mr. Tilley's chapters on Edu- cation and Learning and the Literature of the Sixteenth Century are grateful reminders of his The Literature of, the French Renaissance. Thanks to him, it is easier to understand the immense influence of the Little Schools of Port-Royal, whose spirit has dominated French education down to the present day. "It is due to Port-Royal that in no country in the world is the study of the vernacular for its own sake so much honoured as in France." The editor takes upon himself likewise the resume of the literature of the seventeenth cen- tury. He and Mr. Lytton Strachey are among the few of our literati who can write of the Classic age with true sym- pathetic insight. Mr. H. F. Stewart, of Cambridge, deals cannily with the yeastly ferment of the eighteenth century. Mr. Tilley, after taking French letters through Romanticism and the Empire, hands them over to a Frenchman, M. Gon- zague True, who is not so successful. There are articles on architecture, on art, and on music. For a bit of enteirtain- ment, let the lover of the theatre turn to the review of the stage, its actors, scenery, and customs by M. Alphonse Seche, of the Comedie-Fnangaise. Mr. Robinson's exposition of philosophy has the merit of being agreeable reading even for the layman and the fault of being too short. French thinking has so long and so powerfully influenced European thought that more extensive treatment of it would have been justified. Succinct summaries of mathematics and science, for ever allies of philosophy in France, follow and end these many pages of good reading.
The bibliographies are well chosen and the index capable. The student of any special branch of French life or letters will receive from this Companion to French Studies a valuable sense of unity ; he will understand how very closely the arts and sciences have been knit with the history of the French people.
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