FYNES MORYSON'S Tars work, the first two volumes of which
were noticed by us on November 30th, 1907, is now complete. Vol. III., up to p. 347, is occupied with Irish affairs, beginning with the siege and surrender of Kinsale. The great event of the struggle
• French Novelists of To-Day. By Winifred Stephens. With Portrait and Bibliographies. London: John Lane. [Ss. net.] t An Itinerary : Written by Fries Moryson, Gent. Vols. In. and Iv. Glasgow : J. IdaeLehose and Sons. [l2s. 64. net per vol.]
was the attempted relief of the town by the Irish under Tyrone. This seems to have been a total failure. A detail significant of the way in which an Irish battle was fought in those days is that the number of the killed amounted to more than two thousand, of the wounded to less than one hundred. The Spaniards, disgusted by the affair, at once offered to treat. "The Irish," they thought, were "not onely weake and barbarous, but (as he feared) perfidious friends." The story that follows is somewhat dreary, though some of the details are of no small importance,—the muster of the army in Ireland, for instance. In October, 1601, it was 1,198 horse and 16,000 foot ; six months afterwards the totals were increased by 289 and 950. The Queen was urgent for a reduction, and this seems to have been effected, for the next numbers given, suspiciously round, by the way, are 1,000 horse and 12,000 foot. The total cost of the war (October 1st, 1598—March 1st, 1605) is given at 21,918,717, but what we are to add for "great concordatums, great charge of munitions, and other great extraordinaries " we are left to guess. The rest of the third volume is occupied with a "Discourse of Travelling in General," full of humorous and shrewd observation. The details of cost are worth noting. For foreign countries these are given in coins which it is not always easy to reduce into English money. In this country threepence a mile was paid for a riding-horse. This charge Moryson regards as "extraordinary," but remarks that a man travels fast and avoids the expense of inns ; "all the difficulty is to have a body able to endure the toil." As to the inns, we read that "one that eats in his own chamber with one or two servants attending him may spend some five or six shillings for supper and breakfast." "Coaches are not to be hired anywhere but in London." Here a coach with two horses cost ten shillings a day ; but "the ways far from London are dirty." The fourth volume contains the conclusions reached by the author in the course of his travels, travels which took in nearly every European country except Russia (the word occurs only in a description of Poland) and Spain and Portugal. Turkey appears in the list, and the term includes Western Asia as far as the Euphrates, Egypt, and Northern Africa. The description of manners and customs in these countries is anything but tedious ; certainly there is much that it would not be discreet to quote. Germany, which comes first on the list, evidently astonished a somewhat hardened traveller by its portentous ways of eating and drinking. Moryson uses Latin copiously, but, unless he is misrepresented in this edition, very incorrectly.
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