A General Sketch of European Literature in the Centuries of
Romance. By Laurie Magnus. (Kegan Paul and Co. 108. Od. net.)--In this very readable volume, to be followed by two others, Mr. Magnus has provided for the period ending with Milton a general sketch of European literature. The late Professor Dowden said that such a book was needed for young students of literature, to give them, as it were, an outline map of the subject, such as historical students find in Freeman's General Sketch of European History. Many people who are not students will find this survey of a wide field both interesting and useful, for few writers since Hallam's day have attempted to envisage the literary activity of mediaeval and modem Europe as a whole, in successive ages, though literary histories of the separate countries abound. Chaucer ceases to be an isolated phenomenon for those who read Mr. Magnus's chapter on the fourteenth century, dealing with Froissart, Ayala, Boccaccio, and Potrarch, and our early Elizabethans become far more intelligible when we know some- thing of what was being written in France, Spain, It•aly,asid Germany in their time.
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