Old Continental Towns. By Walter M. Gallichan. (T. Werner Laurie.
6s. net.)—It could hardly be expected that any one should write equally well about twenty-five towns distributed over Italy, Germany, France, Spain ; in short, over Europe generally. Mr. Gallia= certainly does not. His four Spanish towns are described in a way that may serve a traveller; the same praise may be bestowed on the accounts given of others. Unfortunately the first in the list, Rome, and the last, Athens, to which one naturally turns, are very poor. Out of seventeen pages given to Athens, all but four or five are occupied with an historical sketch, which, to say the least, one may find far better done elsewhere. When was Herodotus banished from Athens ? He was hospitably received there, and became intimate with its best society, but found it expedient, probably from financial reasons—we know that he received a grant from the Athenian Treasury—to leave the city with the colony which founded Thurium. What, again, is meant by the statement that one of the victories of Cimon was "over the invading Persian hosts who harassed the Thracians " ? We might be reading of the march of Xerxes, when the Thracians were certainly harassed, but we cannot fit in the description with the story of Cimon's campaign against the Persians. We do not expect to find this sort of thing when we look into a book on 0:d Continental Towns.
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