History of Hastings Castle. By Charles Dawson. 2 vols. (Con-
stable and Co. 42s. net.)—Mr. Dawson tells us about many interesting things, and arranges them, so to speak, with Hastings for a centre. But the castle itself is not prominent. We know to whom it belonged ; we are probably right in supposing that when Royal visits to Hastings are mentioned, the castle was the residence of the visitor; we hear of money spent on the buildings. And Mr. Dawson has most industriously collected all that is known, or can be reasonably conjectured, about the design, the architecture, the military significance, &c. We have plans, too, of the remains. But it must be allowed that, taken as a whole, the book is more a history of England up to the sixteenth century than of Hastings Castle. On the other hand, there is a very full account of the ancient Chapel of St.-Mary-in-the-Castle. The ecclesiastical records are, as often happens, much more ample than the secular. The present Chapel of St. Mary represents in a way, a most dissimilar way, an old foundation. (We hear of a hasty visitor mistaking its circular roof for the local gasworks.) Mr. Dawson devotes much space to an account of the various prebends of which this foundation consisted. He describes the churches of the parishes included, and gives extracts from the registers, a list of incumbents, and other parochial miscellanea. All this is interesting, but it belongs very remotely to a " history of Hastings Castle." We are not criticising the work unfavourably; the author has evidently taken a vast amount of trouble with it, and as it is not likely that it will be done again, he is right in including all the matter that his researches have brought to light.
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