CURRENT LITERATURE.
The French Revolution, 1789-1795. By Bertha Meriton Gardiner. (Longmans.)—The adult reader of this volume, the latest of the "Epochs of Modern History," will do well to bear the fact in mind that the series was, at least originally, intended not for such as he, but for advanced pupils in schools. The period of which Mrs. Gar- diner treats—if, indeed, it should not be styled a tragic episode rather than a period—has been so much left to the psychologist on a large scale, the moralist, the rhetorician, the prose-poet, and the scientific historian, that we are as yet hardly prepared for a calm and almost painfally matter-of-fact narrative of it adapted to the intelligence of boys and girls of sixteen. Mrs. Gardiner is, perhaps, a little too anxious to pat the Revolu- tion in "plain collar, and cuffs to match." She has probably no sympathy with the magnificent deshabill4 of Carlyle; at all events, it is rather ominous that in her preface she should make no mention of him, while she acknowledges her obligations to Michelet, Louis Blanc, Von Sybel, and Taine, and even to such less-known writers as Franeisque 3SIge and Mortimer Ternattx. But we cannot have everything in a history of the French Revolution—at all events, yet —and we ought to be content with the fact that Mrs. Gardiner sup- plies ns with a great deal,—impartiality, method, clearness of state- ment, caution in judgment. Seldom, if ever, even in much larger and more imposing works, has there been given, at least to the English public, a better narrative of the events that led up to the Revolution. In the course of four pages. (pp. 13-17), we have the differences in doctrine between the Voltaireans, the Encyclopmdists, the Economists, and the Rousseanists stated with a. precision and even a fullness quite sufficient for all practical purposes. Mrs. Gardiner's representation of the aims of and the essential differences, between the leading Revolutionary chiefs is marked by scrupulous fairness. The few words in which she traces the con- nection between the doctrines of Rousseau and the fanaticism of St. Just, who, bad he lived, would probably have superseded Robespierre, since he excelled him in moral force, will compare favourably, even in point of lucidity, with what Mr. John Morley has so admirably said on the same snbject.
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