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The Library.

By

Plays and Masques at Court, 1558-1642.
Mary Susan Steele. (Yale University Press:
London, Humphrey Milford. 188. net).
PRIMARILY & reference book, and by the
nature of the case, not presenting any-
thing much that is actually new, this careful
compilation has and deserves its place in our
array of apparatus for the understanding of
Elizabethan and Stuart drama. No one before
had put together quite this material and for
this whole period. A court performance is
taken to mean any dramatic representation
before the sovereign or other members of the
royal family wheresoever given, excluding, how-
ever, mere shows and pageants. After the
chronological list which forms the bulk of the
book come a list of the principal works cited, an
index of authors, and an index of titles, to
which we wish Dr. Steele had seen fit to add

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The playwright whose work was most in
request at Court during this time was Ben
Jonson, after him Beaumont and Fletcher.
In 1637 there was a Court performance of The
Cid' in Joseph Rutter's translation. Occa-
sionally plays were such as, not without reason,
to wound the susceptibilities of ambassadors,
as when in 1622 the Cambridge people enter-
tained James I with Hacket's play, Loyola,'
or when, in 1558/9, at Westminster, there was
enacted a farce in which crows appeared in the
habits of Cardinals, asses in those of Bishops,
and wolves in those of Abbots. Note of this
Papers, and Dr. Steele has gleaned several
was found in the Calendars of Venetian State
other interesting particulars from printed
good, concise account of the original sources,
sources of this kind. Her Preface gives a

and of earlier work on all this material.
The Founders of Seismology. By Charles
Davison. (Cambridge University Press.
12s. 6d. net.).
EISMOLOGY

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an index of the several places in which the
resembles astronomy and
plays and masques were performed, for to this,
physics in having the history of its pro-
too, belong interesting considerations. White-gress connected with personalities of worth and
hall is, naturally, the main theatre. Of the
charm apart from their genius and their scien-
dozen occasions or so when a play of Shake-
tific achievement. Dr. Davison lets these per-
speare's was put on at Court under James I mainly occupied with detail and final outcome
sonal qualities through, even though he is
and Charles I, Whitehall-Banqueting House
Great Hall or Cockpit-was always the of the work of the several founders of seis-
scene. For the two or three plays of his con-
mology. One of the most attractive of them all
jectured to have been acted before Elizabeth,
is the eighteenth century John Michell, fellow
however, the players went to Hampton Court,
of Queen's College, Cambridge, and professor of
to Greenwich and to Windsor. Hampton Court, geology in that university, who lectured not
in Elizabeth's day, if it does not vie with only on mathematics but likewise on Greek and
Whitehall in the point of a crowded theatrical
Hebrew. When marriage separated him from
history, makes no bad second.
Cambridge he retired to a country living near
Winchester first, then at Havant, then at
Thornhill in Yorkshire, where he died. He was
an excellent parish priest and a good neigh-

social demands upon him found time and
energy to carry on scientific work of the first
importance, requiring, too, the patient exer-
cise of mental power of a high order. His
contributions of permanent value to the science
of seismology Dr. Davison takes to be his dis-
tinction between the phenomena accompanying
an earthquake which are essential to it and
those which are not; his attempt to give a con-
sistent theory of the origin of earthquakes, in
which he appears to have hit the truth in his
account of earthquake-sounds and of seismic
sea-waves; and lastly the two methods he
devised-overlooked since his day, and then
re-invented--for determining the position of
the epicentre.

Those were cheerful days when not only were
Twelfth Night and Shrove tide, neglected by us,
observed as occasions of merriment, but Sun-
day, too, was held to be a good day for enjoy-bour, and in spite of all the parochial and
ing a play. Perhaps some people-but it was
not the Court-pushed the liberty of the
theatre rather far, as, for instance, the Cam-
bridge authorities did when Elizabeth visited
them in 1564 and what must they do but
turn King's College Chapel into a playhouse
and act Plautus there before her on a Sunday
evening after evening prayer, and other plays
on the following nights. Students of Eliza-
bethan drama know all about this, yet will not
be sorry to see the pertinent sources quoted.
Oxford, with Christ Church Hall, had no need
for recourse to doubtful proceedings in the way
of transforming any chapel, when Elizabeth
descended upon them in 1566 and after a week's
stay among them left the scholars in ecstasies
of loyalty. When James I visited Cambridge
the dramatic representation in his honour took
place in the Hall of Trinity College. His first
visit was the occasion when, to the infuriation
of Oxford and the hearty amusement of the
King, Ruggle's Latin comedy,Ignoramus,' was
produced such a good comedy in his eyes that
having heard it in March and not being able
to persuade the actors to come to Court he
went back to Cambridge in May to see it over
again.

The next important worker is Alexis Perrey,
son of a forest-ranger on the Haute-Marne,
who worked for thirty years at Dijon, as pro-
fessor of mathematics and director of the
municipal observatory. He contributed little
to positive knowledge, though he put forward
suggestions for new terms in the science, and
a theory concerning lunar periodicity in earth-
quakes which was a good deal discussed; his
claim to recognition rests on the records he
made, his annual lists and regional memoirs.

Still more noteworthy was his contemporary Robert Mallet, a Dublin man whose principal work for the earlier years of his life was engineering. At about thirtyfive years of age, while he was building a railway station, his notice was caught by the diagram in Lyell's Principles of the two pillars which had had their upper parts twisted, but not overthrown, in an earthquake. He perceived that the explanation given of this was incorrect; and he perceived what was the right explanation, and thence went on to a general consideration of the dynamics of earthquakes, which he embodied in a memoir, to be regarded, as Dr. Davison says, whatever its imperfections, as one of the chief foundation-stones of seismology as a science." This was followed up by several studies of earthquake-phenomena, the last of which, discussing the great Neapolitan earthquake of 1857, is the first scientific investigation of its kind. Besides this, we owe to Mallet the invention of several terms now in use-among them "seismology itself; the statement of the laws that govern the distribution of earthquakes in time and space; and a determining influence upon the whole point of view by which the methods of the study were in those early days controlled.

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From him and some notes on his successors we pass to a chapter on the study of earthquakes in Italy-the work that is, of Palmieri and Bertelli, of De Rossi, Mercalli and Tacchini. This is, naturally, but a summary chapter; Dr. Davison, however, writes well, and what he is forced to compress does not thereby lose life and colour. The great service rendered by the Italian seismologists is their impressive series of earthquake investigations, with the erection of the first observatory for seismological purposes, and the invention of the first sensitive recording instrument. The seismological work of Central Europe has achieved most in the way of making out connexion between earthquakes and the structure of the earth's crust, and establishing the pos sibility of multiple origin for some earthquakes. To these workers, too, are owing the construction of isoseismal lines and the determination of the epicentre by means of them, as well as the use of time-records in determining the depth of the focus. The seismologists of the United States have done brilliant work in the study of special earthquakes, and also in the compilation of earthquake-catalogues for spe cial districts.

We come next to Montessus de Ballore, the great French seismologist, who, after a military training side by side with Marshal Foch, was sent as a young captain of artillery to San Salvador, and there began the pursuit of his life by studying earthquakes in his leisure hours. The immensity of his labours is astonishing. He has left, unpublished but accessible to students, a catalogue of 171,434 earthquakes. His Géographie Séismologique of 1906, was followed in 1907 by La Science Séismologique';

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in 1917 he published a text-book La Séismologie Moderne' and towards the close of his life, he turned in another direction and produced a number of historical essays besides the work of his vast bibliography of seismology. It must increase astonishment to recollect that to all the work we have mentioned, and numerous memoirs besides, must be added no inconsiderable amount of work in the way of criticism of other seismologists.

The two closing chapters of the book are devoted respectively to John Milne and to Fusakichi Omori. In both of these we reach a new stage in seismological study, which has as one main characteristic more definite and active co-operation among seismologists, and as another, the prominence of their interest in Japan. Milne was the founder of the Seismological Society of Japan, for which he justly claimed that it marked an epoch in the history of the science. It was formed in 1880 and continued its work till 1892, in which year, upon the wellsupported petition of Baron Kikuchi, was formed the Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee. Of this Fusakichi Omori was president from 1897 to 1923. In the late summer of 1923 he was returning home from Australia, his health on the journey steadily declining; he arrived at Tokyo just after the great earthquake and fire of Sept. 1, and died there in the University Hospital, on Nov. 8, having received a day or two before his death the highest order of the Sacred Treasure. The lives of these two great seismologists bring before the reader a perfectly staggering amount of work accomplished, whether we consider the range of their researches, or the bulk of their output, the immensity of the mere records of fact, or again the importance of their total achievement-particularly where Omori is concerned. This is, indeed, an admirable book.

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CONTENTS.-No. 2.

MEMORABILIA :-19. NOTES:-The Granatieri di Sardegna, 21-Yorkshire Clerics temp. Henry III, 24-Archbishop Grindal's Instructions on public penance-Old Lombard Street-Halley's verses to Newton Harmonies of the Gospels, 26. QUERIES:-The Cumberland Society: D'Almeida: Brome-R. S. Hawker's Godmother-Passport to France, 1689-Dr. William Perfect-Hair sud. denly turned white-John Stanley, S.J.-De Beauvoir Family-King Alfred in the new mural paintings for St. Stephen's Hall, 27-Loss of the Great Harry-Jackson of the Red House, Hackney-Bonham: Carter: Pyke Families David Bruce (ob. 1771)- All Sir Garnet," 28-Catholic

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Registers printed Major John Bernardi: E following complete

Habeas Corpus-Dr. Charles Mingay Syder Cundell Family- Author wanted, 29.

REPLIES:-John

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Ranby, Sergt.-Surgeon

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be carved by Mr. S. W. Knox as a memorial to his father, Dr. Kyle Knox, a business man who was also a great churchman, and was a member of the Convention which produced the Constitution by which churchmen are now governed, and moved in the Synod the bill which created Cathedral in Belfast. The members of the choir have undertaken to defray the cost of putting mosaics into the great central tympanum on the inside. Mr. Milne Barbour, in memory of his wife, is making a gift to be spent in the provision of a floor of marble and wood.

sent either to London or to Wycombe; letters PERHAPS the two articles in the July

for the Editor to the London Office.

Memorabilia.

THE celebration of the ninth centenary of the birth of William the Conqueror, which had Falaise his birthplace as its centre, has clearly been one of the most satisfactory of all such commemorations. The little Norman town could not, by its public accommodations alone, have coped with the invasion of visitors, and the private hospitality which supplied what was wanting by throwing open the chief houses for twenty miles around, was itself delightful feature of the festivity. Whether decoration or pageantry or learning or feasting be considered-the Court of Love or lectures on William's character and career

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the whole scheme worked out worthily both of the distinguished guests who came to be present, and of the hero of the occasion, for > whom his fellow-townsmen can certainly claim with truth that he is one of the very few human beings whose doings have directly changed the course of history.

IN the Irish Times of July 4 we noticed some interesting particulars about Belfast Cathedral. Interest in the Cathedral aroused by the dedication of the portals is still widespread, and practical proof has been given of this in many ways. The Primate and Mrs. D'Arcy propose to carve the corbel of Ussher, the greatest of His Grace's predecessors, next to St. Patrick. The Rev. Donald Young, in memory of his father-in-law, Mr. Granby Higinbotham, will carve the corbel of the Archangel Gabriel above the Respond of Fortitude. The Dioceses of Limerick and of Ossory are also to be responsible for carving.

The last remaining available pillar is to

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Connoisseur most likely to interest our readers are that by our correspondent Mr. A. Forbes Sieveking on Some Little-known Portraits of Voltaire, and that on Wren's Restoration of Westminster Abbey, of which the part relating to the drawings is contributed by Mr. E. Beresford Chancellor and that relating to the signatures by Mr. Laurence E. Tanner. The Westminster drawings number fourteen, and include (reproduced here) an elevation of the North Transept according to Wren's scheme; design for a central tower; an alternative design for a dome and spire, and ground plans of the Abbey. An endorsement on the first of these "I doe approve of this Design Mr. Tanner considers to be in Bishop Atterbury's hand; the first signature to it is Wren's followed by Michael Evans, Subdean, Henry Barker (Prebendary, wit, inventor of drops for the palsy, and lover of cats), The drawings, Thomas Sprat and Morice. having been left behind with tioneer as worthless, passed through the of Mr. Gordon Roe, who, by way of Westhands of several owners and arrived at those minster School, has restored them to the Abbey. Seven portraits of Voltaire, hitherto undescribed, are reproduced in Mr. Sieveking's paper. One, belonging to Mr. R. C. de la Condamine, by Huber, a thing of gouache and silk, may, our author thinks, be the one Austin Dobson makes note of as in the blue room at Strawberry Hill. From his own collection he takes the interesting black-and-red chalk drawing by Worlidge, and a bust in Staffordshire pottery; from Mr. Ernest Rechnitzer's a miniature bust in ivory signed "Rosset-Dupont de St. Claude." Two striking items are the wax bust and the figure of the dying Voltaire by Christopher Curtius. The illustrations are accompanied by and expounded in an uncommonly interesting essay.

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