The Queen's i'Wet. By Canon Sheehan, D.D. (Longmans and Co.
6s.)—We are reminded, and that many times, as we reacll Canon Sheehan's book of the Horatian maxim, Nee pueros coranv. populo Medea truoiclet. He transgresses it most flagrantly. Ha. spares us nothing of the horrors of the Revolution. Massacres in Paris and in the provinces, even the unspeakable infamy of the Jacobin dealing with the child Dauphin, all is here; and we have to pass through this sea of blood, for the Canon writes with power- and we are constrained to follow him. Nevertheless this is a fine- story. Maurice de Brignon, heir of a great French noble, but. arbitrarily dispossessed of his birthright, a soldier of the Revolu- tion, captured in spite of himself by the compelling power of Marie Antoinette, and gathering in himself not a few of the con- tradictions of a stormy time, is a very powerful study. And we have not a few subsidiary portraits : Talleyrand, who comes out better than one might expect from the hand of the artist, and Andre Chenier are among them. There is an epilogue which brings us down to the era of the Restoration. The misdeeds of the- Bourbons match the crimes of the Revolution. But is there not. some. exaggeration in what is said about Ney ? There could ham
been no question about the fate of a smaller man who betrayed his trust in such a fashion.
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