A Short History of the English Parliament. By Andrew Bisset.
(Williams and Norgate.)—How Mr. Bisset should have supposed that be was presenting the public with a history of tha English Parlia- ment, or, for that matter, with the history of anything, when he issued this book, is a mystery. It is simply a hotch-potch of personal anecdotes, ultra-Radical and ultra-bitter pamphleteering against feudalism and other hetes noires of the author's, and of quotations from dramas, speeches, historical works, and what not, on almost everything and everybody political under the sun. Mr. Bisset means well, and with many of his political views we sympathise ; but be bee probably fewer of the qualities of the historian than any man who has ever attempted that difficult character. As for the style in which it is written, here is a specimen :—" I suppose the Devil is as old, perhaps a little older, than Domesday Book. The Devil, too, was not only alive, but kicking, when the author a Domesday Book reduced the northern counties of England to a desert." There are so many quotations in Mr. Bisset's book, some of them, too, of con- siderable value, that if he had supplied it with an index, it might, as a reference-book, have given amusement, and possibly even a little edification.
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