and ascertain the impression which they made upon the commonalty. This resource failing, the reviewer can only record his own impressions, which are obviously not those of the Oxford student. The book gave rise to pleasant anticipations. Passing in review the great mass of material in his History of the United States, would the author see fit, after the lapse of years, to revise his judgment of men and events? To what extent would he accept the work which younger and lesser historians have accomplished since he wrote? And how would he distribute emphasis when time and space forced him to eliminate those varying shifts of opinions and incidents which in the larger work chain the interest of the reader as the great drama unfolds? The reviewer has laid down the book with a sense of disappointment. Mr. Rhodes is not at his best in this form of exposition. Forced to extricate himself from details, he has put in bald and almost dogmatic form conclusions which he erstwhile expressed with important qualifications. If he has read the newer literature on the antecedents of the war, he has paid scant attention to its effect upon his earlier conclusions.

In one sense the title given to these lectures is a misnomer. Fully one-half of the book is given up to the political antecedents of the war. As for the rest, the lecturer frankly announces his purpose to treat campaigns and battles briefly, and to dwell upon the salient characteristics of the conflict and their bearing on its issue. Even so, the treatment seems somewhat arbitrary. There are comments on Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, but only passing allusions to the campaigns. in the West and a single reference to Sherman's march to the sea; there is an account of the Trent affair and some discussion of the attitude of England during the war, but little or nothing about the blockade. Indeed, the conspicuous defect of Mr. Rhodes's history appears again in these lectures. The economic factors are either wholly ignored or subordinated to the political events which they caused or conditioned. On the other hand, what the lecturer must have conveyed to his hearers was a sense of the immense stake for which North and South played, a vivid picture of the heroism of the combatants, and a moral enthusiasm for the unique personalities which the war produced in Lincoln and Lee. And every Oxford student must have been impressed with the qualities which Mr. Rhodes possesses in an eminent degree-candor and impartiality.

Recollections of the Civil War. With many original Diary Entries and Letters written from the Seat of War, and with annotated References. By Mason Whiting Tyler, late Lieut.-Colonel and Brevet-Colonel, 37th Reg't Mass. Vols. Edited by William S. Tyler. (New York and London, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, pp. xvii, 379.) Colonel Tyler was one of that splendid body of young officers who served Massachusetts in the Army of the Potomac, and who by their efficiency, their high sense of duty, and their ardent patriotism, exercised an influence far out of proportion to their numbers and rank.

He came of sterling New England stock. Twenty Puritan ministers, one of them Jonathan Edwards, were among his ancestors, and his father was William Seymour Tyler, for over sixty years professor of Greek at Amherst College. The son graduated from Amherst in July, 1862, and, although in frail health, enlisted at once and was commissioned a second lieutenant by Governor Andrew. Except for a short detail of staff duty, he served throughout the war with the 37th Massachusetts, and at the close was in command of the regiment. He participated in all of the great battles of the Army of the Potomac from the first Fredericksburg to the capture of Petersburg and was with Sheridan at Winchester. After the war, he practised law with distinguished success in New York City.

Colonel Tyler had only partially completed the first draft of his manuscript at the time of his death. It ended with the arrival of the army · before Petersburg; but the story of his service is continued by extracts from his letters and his diary.

So far as the book purports to be a history it does not invite special comment. But there can be no question of the real value and importance of the personal reminiscences and the picture they give of the inner life and struggles of the great army.

Perhaps the most instructive and certainly the most interesting chapter is the one devoted to a carefully written and detailed account of the battle for the Salient at Spottsylvania. The 37th Massachusetts held the apex of the Angle for twenty-two unbroken hours of desperate fighting and the reader of Colonel Tyler's very graphic description will not be inclined to challenge his high estimate of the service rendered by the regiment in that terrible struggle. A statement of the part taken and the position occupied by each of the brigades of the 6th corps engaged at the Angle is given in an appendix.

The chapters devoted to the letters and diary are accompanied by brief historical statements and notes which add to their interest. These are by the Reverend Calvin Stebbins, a classmate and life-long friend of Colonel Tyler.

For those who manage Spanish easily the Memorias Inéditas del Licenciado Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (Brownsville, Texas, Tipografia de El Porvenir, pp. 111) should prove interesting and instructive reading in view of recent events in Mexico.

On the death of Juárez in 1872, Lerdo, then chief justice of the supreme court, became president of the republic. Four years later, as a result of a contested election, he was driven out of the country by General Porfirio Díaz. He died in New York, in 1889, where his memoirs were written-a disappointed old man without family and with few remaining friends.

Written in a discursive style, with many graphic touches that make' one wish that the author had devoted himself to letters rather than to politics, with many blemishes in discussing his enemy's family affairs that

make one wish he had been more of a gentleman, the memoirs of Lerdo unconsciously disclose the enormous difficulties that await the man who endeavors to govern Mexico constitutionally. His description of the massacre of Vera Cruz, as the result of Diaz's telegram, Mátalos en caliente, is a model of rapid, vivid sketch work. But "Papá Lerdo's " manifest error was in attempting to apply European culture and administration to a country too recently emerged from despotism and anarchy to understand constitutional government.

E. L. C. MORSE.

COMMUNICATION

June 4, 1913.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW:

Sir:

The reviewer of my book The Origin of the English Constitution in your April number, pp. 567–571, frankly admits at the close that he may at various places have mistaken my meaning. Will you allow me through the REVIEW to ask those who may be interested in the subject not to accept the interpretation of the book which is given by the reviewer but to go directly to the book itself for their knowledge of what it says? The reviewer's interpretation in general, and in most of the specific statements made, I cannot accept as an accurate representation of my ideas. The analysis of my arguments at the foot of p. 568 and on p. 570, for example, I wholly repudiate. I hope I should never make use of such arguments, nor have I ever entertained such ideas. Any one who will turn to n. 10, p. 21, which is cited, will see that it is clearly concerned with a single point only, and cannot fairly be used as a general confession; that it is quite the contrary indeed. But I do not care to go into detail. I merely wish to ask any who may be interested to get their ideas of the book from its own pages.

G. B. ADAMS.

NOTES AND NEWS

From June 18 to September 18 the address of the managing editor of this journal will be "North Edgecomb, Maine ".

AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The Annual Report for 1911 will be distributed to members in the autumn.

In the Original Narratives series, Messrs. Scribner have published this spring the Journal of Jasper Danckaerts. The volume of Narratives of Indian and French Wars, edited by Dr. Charles H. Lincoln, is in the press and will be issued in the autumn. The next volume in the series, to be brought out in the ensuing spring, is Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, edited by Professor George L. Burr of Cornell University.

PERSONAL

M. Paul Thureau-Dangin, since 1906 perpetual secretary of the French Academy, died at Cannes on February 24, 1913, in his seventy-sixth year. His attachment to the Catholic Church and to the liberal principles of the Orleans monarchy appears in nearly all of his works, especially the two major ones, Histoire de la Monarchie de Juillet (7 vols., 1886-1892), and Histoire de la Renaissance du Catholicisme en Angleterre au XIXe Siècle (3 vols., 1899-1906).

Professor A. C. Coolidge will be Harvard Exchange Professor in Berlin during the first half of the coming academic year. Professor W. S. Ferguson will be professor of Greek in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens during the whole year 1913-1914, and Professor R. F. Scholz of the University of California will be lecturer in ancient history in Harvard University during its first half.

Dr. Bertha Haven Putnam has been appointed to an associate professorship in history in Mount Holyoke College.

Professor C. H. Hull is to be absent from Cornell University during the year 1913-1914 on sabbatical leave.

Professor John H. Latané of Washington and Lee University has been appointed professor of American history and head of the department of history in the Johns Hopkins University, and will begin his work in that institution in October.

Rev. Peter Guilday, hitherto of Louvain and Rome, has been made professor of ecclesiastical history at the Catholic University of America.

Professor Amos S. Hershey, of the University of Indiana, has been awarded one of the Kahn Travelling Fellowships and will spend the year 1913-1914 in Europe and the Orient.

Professor James W. Thompson, of the University of Chicago, has been advanced to the full rank of professor of history.

Professor Guy Stanton Ford has been appointed professor of history. and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota.

Courses in history will be given in the summer session of Columbia University by Professors John S. Bassett of Smith College, W. L. Westermann of the University of Wisconsin, Albert B. White of the University of Minnesota, and George M. Dutcher of Wesleyan University; in that of the Indiana State University by Professor F. A. Ogg of Simmons College and Professor C. B. Coleman of Butler College; by Professor David L. Patterson of Kansas in that of the University of Illinois; by Professor Carl Becker of Kansas in the University of Chicago; and by Professor Fred M. Fling of Nebraska in that of the University of Minnesota.

GENERAL

General reviews: H. Legband, Geschichte der Litterarischen Kultur (Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, X. 4); P. Diepgen, Geschichte der Medizin (ibid.).

The History Teacher's Magazine for April includes the address, “The History Teacher's Opportunity", delivered in October, 1912, before the Vermont State Teachers' Association, by Professor Theodore F. Collier of Brown University; a paper by Miss Gertrude W. Carrick entitled the Place of Woman in School Histories, and one by Howard C. Hill on the Teaching of History by Type Studies, read before the Wisconsin State Teachers' Association in November, 1912. The May number contains an article by Professor Edward Channing on the Teaching of American History in Schools and Colleges, and a paper by Moses W. Ware on the American Colonies under the Whig Supremacy. In the June number Professor H. Morse Stephens discusses Courses in History in the Junior College, and Professor Arthur C. Cole gives an account of the attempt by the War Department in the decade before the Civil War to introduce the camel into the United States and adapt it to the needs of the army on the southwestern frontier. The Magazine presents in this issue a catalogue of dealers in illustrative historical material, such as photographs, lantern slides, historical post cards, etc., with an introduction by the compiler, Dr. Albert E. McKinley. The editor also prints the report on the Certification of High-School Teachers of History presented by Professor Frederic L. Paxson, as chairman of a committee, to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, at Omaha, May 8-10, 1913.

Ginn and Company have published History as Past Ethics, by P. V. N. Myers. The author holds to the view that "the development of conscience in the race is the ultimate goal of the historic movement ", and therefore aims in this work "to gather and systematize the facts of the moral life of the race and relate them to the philosophic development of morals".