lict, where ideas
and institutions are as much considered as persons and events, and
history is charged with all the elements of fixity, development, and
change. It is little to say, now, that he equals Buckle in the extent,
and surpasses him in the intelligent choice and regulation, of his
reading. He is armed at all points. His information is comprehensive,
minute, exact, and everywhere sufficient, if not everywhere complete. In
this astonishing press of digested facts there is barely space to
discuss the ideas which they exhibit and the law which they obey. M.
Molinier lately wrote that a work with this scope and title "serait, a
notre sens, une entreprise a peu pres chimerique." It will be
interesting to learn whether the opinion of so good a judge has been
altered or confirmed.

The book begins with a survey of all that led to the growth of heresy,
and to the creation, in the thirteenth century, of exceptional tribunals
for its suppression. There can be no doubt that this is the least
satisfactory portion of the whole. It is followed by a singularly
careful account of the steps, legislative and administrative, by which
Church and State combined to organise the intermediate institution, and
of the manner in which its methods were formed by practice. Nothing in
European literature can compete with this, the centre and substance of
Mr. Lea's great history. In the remaining volumes he summons his
witnesses, calls on the nations to declare their experience, and tells
how the new force acted upon society to the end of the Middle Ages.
History of this undefined and international cast, which shows the same
wave breaking upon many shores, is always difficult, from the want of
visible unity and progression, and has seldom succeeded so well as in
this rich but unequal and disjointed narrative. On the most significant
of all the trials, those of the Templars and of Hus, the author spends
his best research; and the strife between Avignon and the Franciscans,
thanks to the propitious aid of Father Ehrle, is better still. Joan of
Arc prospers less than the disciples of Perfect Poverty; and after Joan
of Arc many pages are allotted, rather profusely, to her companion in
arms, who survives in the disguise of Bluebeard. The series of
dissolving scenes ends, in order of time, at Savonarola; and with that
limit the work is complete. The later Inquisition, starting with the
Spanish and developing into the Roman, is not so much a prolon