CURRENT LITERATURE.
Grisons Incidents in Olden Times. By Beatrix L. Tollemache. (Percival.)—The "Olden Times" do not go very far back. The " incident " that occupies the greater part of the book is the bold effort of a certain Thomas Messner to procure the liberation of his son, who had been seized by the French (a most disgraceful proceeding, by-the-way). Messner laid hands on the Due de Vendome, hoping to make an exchange. In this he did not suc- ceed. The poor lad, who had done nothing wrong, except, indeed, being the son of his father, was kept in prison till 1717, when Louis XV. (Mrs. Tollemache would have done better to write, the Regent Orleans) released him. The rest of the volume is mainly devoted to the autobiography of Giacomo Maurizio, a Grisons lad who emigrated first to Lucca, from which he was expelled along with all non-Catholics (as was the way little more than a. century ago, when Rome was in power), then to France. He left France during the Revolution, carrying with him twenty-one louis d'or which he had swallowed (the export of gold and silver was forbidden), and went to Poland. In 1815 he returned home, and died in 1831. Maurizio was by trade a confectioner, a pioneer of the great migration of which one sees so much in the streets of London.
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