Social Life under the Stuart,. By E. Godfrey. (Grant Richards.
12s. 6d.)—Our author takes the first half of the seventeenth century, and it is, of course, a time apart, even from the Eliza- bethan period. There is much that has a deep and pathetic interest in this era, and the writer has made a great point when
grandsons. She has consulted a wide and catholic library of seventeenth-century literature, and has handled it with equal width and thoughtfulness. Demurring to the statement of a, well-known writer that "the seventeenth century is musically almost a blank," she gives a pleasant and instructive idea of the real vogue for music, chamber and otherwise. All
classes were musical by education; it was not, as the writer neatly puts it, an "optional" subject. Among the miscellaneous chapters which more particularly deserve praise are those on "Religion" and "Friendship." The first is handled with remark- able tact and insight, especially the continuation entitled "The Religious Life," which recalls with some skill the attempts of those earthly saints to continue in country parsonages that life which had become so decayed a century earlier, and had been finally swept away two generations before the Stuart period. Indeed, there is much sweet reasonableness in Miss Godfrey's methods of reconstructiug a past social condition. But the chapter that has most charm for us is that on "Friend- ship," in which the author seems to have preserved a real aroma of Stuart sentiment. It was a time, none can deny, for friendship and for testing friendship, and the memorials of some very beautiful ones have been preserved for us. Here, as one would naturally expect from a lady, we find a feminine insight and a certain toot that a masculine touch would have essayed in vain. Falkland, as usual, attracts our author. Perhaps the best-written chapter is "Travelling," an entertaining account of such "grand tours" as the English gentleman of the day carefully described. If our author gives us no striking, no intimate, picture of any man or woman or any one phase of the period, she contrives to bring the people of Stuart times fairly close to us, and to do justice to their finer traits as well as the general conditions of society.
PADDY RISKY.
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