elements in the character and literature of a people. It is easy to see that in this new method there are many dangerous shoals as well as perilous depths: the writer may be stranded or he may sink from sight overwhelmed by his mass of materials. The latter is the danger to which Klein is most frequently exposed. Himself a dramatist of no mean order, he possessed very high critical ability, and, what is remarkable with such a temperament, immense power of application and patient study.* The first two volumes of his work are the best; in them his own personality is more restrained, he is in perfect sympathy with the great dramatists he is describing, and the material at his disposition has not yet grown to the enormous proportions it afterward assumed. Klein had, it seems to us, a fatal misconception of the function of an historian. The historian, we think, is not bound to prove the correctness of his assertions by constantly laying before the reader the material he has himself used. If the reader is obliged to go over the same ground, what is the advantage of the history? It is the duty of the historian to collect, but still more to digest, his facts. Some critic has touched the weak spot in Klein's character as an historian, when he said that he suffered from imperfect literary digestion. The reader is overwhelmed with extracts, analyses, discussions, and a vast amount of utterly irrelevant matter. In the last volume, for example, twenty-two pages are devoted to the geographical constitution of Great Britain, thirty-six to the original and immigrated inhabitants, forty-eight to the Roman and thirty-seven to the Anglo-Saxon conquests. Forty-eight pages are given to the various collections of Scotch and English ballads, with comparatively little reference to their contents. This explains why the work has assumed such gigantic proportions; in the volume above mentioned 754 pages bring us only as far as the Coventry Plays. Another serious defect that adds largely to the volume of the work is the author's fondness for extended analyses of plays under discussion. The general reader will not care to wade through these voluminous compends, and the student will prefer to turn to the original. For example, the second part of XI. volume is de *Julius Leopold Klein was born in 1810, at Miskolcz, Hungary. His parents and early teachers were German. He pursued the study of medicine at Vienna and Berlin, where, after travel in Italy and Greece, he settled and devoted himself to literature. His first drama, "Maria von Medici," appeared in 1842. His collected dramatic works were published in 1871-'72, in 7 vols. He died at Pankow, near Berlin, August 2, 1876. voted to Calderon from 1622 to his death in 1681. The few biographical details are given in the previous volume, and the 707 pages of this one are filled with analyses of his plays. In other words, Klein's work is made up largely of the author's sources heaped indiscriminately together and expanded by endless analyses of ballads, novels, plays, etc., and interspersed with irrelevant discussions and savage attacks on the author's critics. It is a monument of misdirected energy, pervaded by an uncontrollable personality and an utter absence of all true conception of modern scholarship. 7.-D'Ancona, Origini del Teatro in Italia. Origini del Teatro in Italia. Studj sulle Sacre Rappresentazioni seguiti da un' appendice sulle rappresentazioni del contado toscano. Di ALESSANDRO D'ANCONA. Firenze: Successori Le Monnier. 1877. 2 vols. 12mo, pp. 438, 432. IN 1872 Prof. D'Ancona published at Florence three volumes of the religious plays peculiar to Tuscany, technically known as sacre rappresentazioni,* promising in the preface to issue, as soon as possible, a volume containing the results of his study on the sources, form, and history, of these plays. The promised volume has grown to two, and is of a much wider range than the title would lead the reader to suspect. In order to trace the history of the sacre rappresentazioni, the author has been obliged to go back and study the development of the modern drama in general, and in so doing he has filled the long-felt want of a connected history of the liturgical drama and its development in the various countries of Europe. The contents of the two volumes may be divided into four parts. In the first, the author traces the rise of the drama in Europe from the liturgy to the mystery; in the second, the special forms assumed in Italy by the liturgical drama prior to the sacre rappresentazioni; in the third, the birth of the sacre rappresentazioni in Tuscany in the fifteenth century, and its history until it was destroyed by the Renaissance in the sixteenth century; in the fourth, a detailed account is given of everything relating to the representation of these plays, the time, place, actors, etc., with an examination of the typical characters. An appendix furnishes an account of the * "Sacre Rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, raccolte e illustrate per cura di Alessandro D'Ancona." Firenze: Successori Le Monnier. 3 vols. 12mo. 1872. popular dramatic representations of the various parts of Europe and Italy, and especially of those peculiar to Tuscany. The early history of the drama in Italy does not materially differ from that of France, for instance, except that the former went through more stages of growth and finally produced, not the mystery, but the sacre rappresentazioni. These stages of the Italian drama are as follows: from the liturgical drama, which was the same as in the rest of Europe, was evolved in Umbria the lauda drammatica, a hymn of dramatic character sung, not acted, by the Flagellants and other similar religious organizations of the thirteenth century. Afterward the lauda became what was known as divozione, and was acted in the churches; from this are derived the sacre rappresentazioni, and their popular counterpart, the maggi, of the Tuscan peasants. The sacra rappresentazione is a form peculiar to Florence, where it arose about the middle of the fifteenth century from a union of the divozione from Umbria and certain civic displays which had been used from time immemorial to celebrate the feast of John the Baptist, the patron of Florence. Nothing can be more dissimilar than the French mystère and the sacra rappresentazione, and this difference shows the superior intelligence and culture of the Florentines of that day. The mystère, in its final form, is a huge, shapeless composition often disfigured by the utmost grossness and extravagance. The rappresentazione, on the other hand, although necessarily stamped with certain mediæval signs by its origin, is nevertheless a dramatic form that needed only a master-mind like Shakespeare or Lope de Vega to become the germ of a modern national Italian drama. Those who are not specially interested in the early medieval drama will find D'Ancona's work extremely interesting from the standpoint just hinted at. We often hear the question, "Why have the Italians and French no national drama?" The question in regard to the former has been answered in various ways. Schlegel affirms that the Italians have no dramatic talent, an assertion too absurd to treat seriously. Hillebrand (" Études historiques et littéraires," Paris, 1868) attributes the want of a national drama to the lack of national unity, but this would not have prevented a local drama in each of the states into which Italy was then divided.* The true explanation, it seems to us, is the one given by De Amicis and See "L'Imitazione latina nella commedia italiana del XVI secolo, Vincenzo de Amicis," Pisa, 1871. D'Ancona. The Renaissance substituted for the popular national drama, as embodied in the sacra rappresentazione, an imitation of the Latin drama, and the new pagan culture dried up the religious sources of inspiration. It is the same story in France. In England and Spain, the revival of letters came after the national drama had assumed sufficient consistency not to be easily affected; and, moreover, the Renaissance in those countries never assumed the form of a popular enthusiasm as it did in Italy, and to a less degree in France. A recent French writer on this subject, M. Sepet ("Le Drame chrétien au moyen âge," Paris, 1878), recognizes this fact, and declares that the national drama of France is not in the future but in the past, and that it will be impossible to create a new form of drama. France must, he asserts, renew the tradition interrupted in the sixteenth century by the cultivated classes, but still subsisting in the breasts of the people who, even at the present day, still represent mystères. We cannot praise too highly the admirable way in which Prof. D'Ancona has performed his difficult task. No one is better qualified for it. He is profoundly acquainted with the popular literature of Italy in all its branches, and has already illustrated the ballads and legends of his country with remarkable acumen. He has pursued a strictly historical method, and thrown a flood of light on an obscure period in Italian literary history. In conclusion, we must not omit mention of the appendix, which gives an account of the Tuscan peasant-plays still performed in various parts of the province, and which, on a small scale, are counterparts of the famous Ober Ammergau Passion-play, but include besides plays on religious subjects those founded on historical and romantic themes. We commend these popular plays to the attention of the tourist, who may witness them in the neighborhood of Pisa during the summer. 8.-Rome in Canada. The Ultramontane Struggle for Supremacy over the Civil Authority. By CHARLES LINDSEY. Toronto: Lovell Brothers. 1877. THE writer of this volume undertakes to show that the Ultramontane Catholics in the Province of Quebec set up the extreme pretensions of the Church to oversway all other authority, and aim at nothing less than complete control of the government. Startling as this proposition seems, he supports it by such an array of the direct claims and authoritative declarations of the ecclesiastics under the lead of M. Bourget, late Bishop of Montreal, and the head of the new school, backed by the sympathy and approval of the Supreme Pontiff, and by such citations of instances in which the endeavor has been made to carry out these pretensions, that it is impossible not to be convinced that he has a strong case. He does not merely assert, but he shows from the words of the bishops and priests, and the writings of the leading Ultramontane advocates, that it is directly claimed for the Church that she is superior to the state in authority; that laws should be made and administered in obedience to her behests; that marriage contracts without her approval are null, whatever the provisions of the civil law may be; that public discussion should be restrained to the limits laid down by ecclesiastical authority; that freedom of expression and toleration of opinion should not be permitted, etc. As a practical result of such theories, bishops have given instructions to priests, and these have acted upon them, to influence the action of voters in parliamentary elections, by plainly indicating how they should vote, and threatening them with all the terrors of the Church's disfavor if they disobeyed. The contested election cases of Charlevoix and Bonaventure, in 1875, brought out most remarkable revelations of "undue influence" exerted by priests by commands and threats, to secure the return of members whose conduct in Parliament would be subservient to the authority of the Church. Efforts have not been directed merely to securing the election of the faithful, but they have been watched in the performance of their duties, and clerical influence has been brought to bear upon them after their election. Instances are also cited of attempts to influence the judiciary, and secure an interpretation of the laws under a recognition of the authority of the code of Rome, as conclusive in all matters affecting religious rights. The assumptions of the Ultramontane party to exercise complete control over the children of the Church in their capacity as citizens and as public officials are very clearly revealed in this record, and the logical consequence is made plain that, if this insidious and presumptuous power is not checked, it will not stop short of a virtual control of legislation and administration, which would make it extremely uncomfortable for those who were not faithful and obedient children of the Church of Rome. Mr. Lindsey's book is replete with historical information, leading up to the present condition of things, and with facts supporting his conclusions. He makes it quite clear that, on American soil and under the dominion of a Protestant power, the highest pretensions of the Church of Rome are more confidently asserted and more |