indeed La Tousche had preached the same doctrine half a century earlier, and there were continual discussion and controversy between those who still cared for the dagger or the buckler or the cloak as the means of parrying thrusts and the reformers-the men of one weapon. There had been many changes of practice between the early and active days and those of the small sword under Louis XV, and oddly enough they were English and Scotch writers who were very much in favor in those later days. One hesitates to say that topography was in the air in the seventeenth century, or whether to think rather that Matthew Merian, he individually, was the man who studied and taught it to the world of Europe. The title-page to Sansovino's History of Venice—“Venetia, Città Nobilissima et Singolare"-does indeed give a bird's-eye view of Venice which one may study with advantage. It is as far as possible from being a complete picture, but the feeling for the water-ways leading from the open lagoon on the south to that on the north of the built-up town, including the S-curved Canalazzo and the straightaway Canareggio, the square towers rising above the domes of the churches, the Giudecca with its gardens indicated by tree-tops and its six sharp-pointed campanili, the neighboring and smaller islands-a row of them, beginning with S. Giorgio-all this is attractive and impressive, and one forgives the slight and hasty examination which the engraver had given to the minor facts of the case. That book is dated 1663. Matthew Merian was a publisher of Frankfort-on-the-Main, and he brought out a number of books devoted to the different German lands, and especially their interesting old towns. There is one devoted to Alsace, dated 1663, shortly after the cession of the country by the Austrian monarchy to France. Not Obern und Untern Elsass only are treated in this book, but Breisgau also, and Sundgau and other countries thereabout. And so it happens that we have such interesting places as Weissenburg with its noble great church and accompanying smaller ones, its ancient walls and moats, its fortified gateways, its covered bridges, its watermills on the little Lauter and the wooded hills about it, and castled Berbelstein towering above them all. Equally attractive is the view of Colmar, though this town is shown as fortified in the modern way as if by Vauban himself, with bastions and demilunes and the complete star system carried out to the full. This view is a bird's-eye view, indeed, showing the country for ten miles away in at least three directions, and neighboring villages by the score, with such solitary castles as Sulzberg and Hohenhatstatt strongly emphasized. Freiburg in Breisgau is given in a large plate, with the famous traceried spire of its minster, the spire which led the nineteenth century restorers of Cologne Cathedral in the right way. But naturally Strasburg is the most interesting place of all, and of that famous town there are two views, one a bird's-eye view taken from a point so very high above the city that it constitutes a map at least of the fortifications and the principal monuments, for the streets and dwellings are ignored. Here sweeps down the Ill, meeting the Breusch, the two dividing into a dozen narrow channels serving as moats to the fortifications, and serving also, as they run through the town, for a limited kind of local intercourse by boats; here is the cathedral even as we know it now, with its prodigious western frontispiece dwarfing the relatively small nave and choir. But the view, the "prospect" itself is a really noble landscape of the exact or realistic school. This is really Strasburg as I knew it in 1860, when I crossed on foot from Kehl over the Rhine bridge. Another splendid book, one of the rather numerous volumes published by Merian, is devoted to the Duchies of Brunswick and Lüneberg, the native country of the Hanoverian kings of Great Britian and Ireland. There is no town within that dominion as attractive as Strasburg, perhaps none as interesting as Weissenburg, and yet the view of Brunswick taken as from a near point of view, as if from a tower half a mile from the walls, is a most precious landscape-really a model of how facts of external nature may be combined with artistic effects to produce a noble result. To those who go to Hanover to live that their children may have the advantage of the best German that there is to be had (though indeed the Hanoverians tell you that you must go to Celle for that), such enthusiasts will be a good deal surprised if they look at this picture of the little fortified town with its Romanesque steeples, its long stretch of Electoral Palace in a quarter of the city where at present few travelers wander, and absolutely no signs of that great north suburb or new city —that city of tall apartment houses which has grown up since the separation of the crowns of England and Hanover. That separation by a print on page 226, showing the destruccame when Victoria ascended the English throne, she being debarred by her sex from succeeding to the throne of Hanover, and so we have learned to date the new city from just that year 1837; but the illustration, on a great folding sheet, is none the less a most attractive landscape. One regrets only that Herrenhausen, with its palace and fountains, the real home of the Hanoverian monarchs, should not have been allowed even a corner of this large picture-in default of a plate of its own; though, indeed, the gardens were not in 1654 what they came to be a century later. And one cannot leave the volume without mentioning the view of Hamelen, as the engraver hasspelledit, or Hameln, as the printer has set it up, the latter being also the modern form of the name. This is the town where the famous Rat Catcher appeared and carried off the children, as we learn from various authorities, and especially from Robert Browning, who spelled the name Hamelin for the sake of his metre. There are wood-cuts, too, in the seventeenth-century books, but the years before 1580 make up the really prolific and favorable time for wood-cuts, and it is better for us now to stick to the books illustrated with coppers. For instance, there is a little quarto dated 1668 and published at Amsterdam by Jacques Benjamin, though in French; the title of which is too long to quote, but it deals with the wars in Europe between 1664 and 1667. The title-page has a print from a line engraving showing an unnamed sea-fight with high-pooped ships of war cannonading and rolled in smoke, while two at least of the vessels are burning furiously. This is a mere decoration; it might stand for any seafight; but the expedition of the Dutch to the Thames on June 20th and 22nd, 1667, when the fleet of the United Provinces sailed up the Medway to Rochester and burned the ships lying at Chatham, is illustrated by the picture of a fort, probably that of Sheerness, called Chernesse by our author. In the middle of the fort is a high-roofed building over which floats the Dutch flag. Some of the buildings are shown burning, while on the shore are drawn up the boats of the landing party. A little village with a pointed, high churchtower is seen beyond: perhaps Wallend in the Isle of Grain. That was the last time that hostile cannon were heard in the streets of London. The same subject is continued tion of the ships of the English fleet. But the culminating shock of horror and excitement is given by the plate on page 169, where the great fire of London is represented in a most impressive way, the hard black lines made by the burin rendering the effect of smoke and flame with singular skill, and all because of the clear sense of his resources possessed by the engraver, and his knowledge of how to make the most of a few bright lights. That, now, is the character of the seventeenth-century books-history, topography, the search for facts, or what were taken as facts, and the representation of these by means of carefully engraved metal plates from which the print was done with a good deal of intelligence, although in the simplest way, so that the impressions even on pages of which the half was printed from type at another time, are interesting and even fine. We have it again in Fontana's "I Pregi della Toscana" of 1701, the plates of which are the best authority one finds for the look of the galleys, those huge rowboats of war which were then soon to disappear. Portraiture, of course, is an important affair in the seventeenth century, and the "Gulden Cabinet," printed at Antwerp in 1661, is the earliest important display of such portrait effects as were to be the special employment of Houbraken a century later. This collection of portraits includes a number of subjects that are interesting to students of fine art, heads of Gaspar de Crayer; of Jordaens, that famous right-hand man of Rubens, the most powerful of the secondary men of the time; and of Rubens himself, who is not exactly a secondary man. The portrait of this great artist is a good deal idealized, with a delicate Italian touch given to the face, as is natural enough. It does not appear that Cornelis Meyssens and his brother Jan engraved all these very serious, manly plates, but Jan Meyssens certainly engraved the portrait of Cornelis de Bie, a famous man of law, the print of which appears on page 17. The heads and many of the artist-portraits which follow include a most celebrated Snyders and that Quellinus whose paintings or finished drawings were followed by the engravers of many of these busts. One print at least is signed by Wenzel Hollar, and that is enough to immortalize the book. RUSSELL STURGIS. 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