like causes will always produce like results.  Read Walewski’s “Life of Ivan the Terrible,” and you will find that more than a century later Russia produced a monarch even more diabolical, but working exactly on the same lines as Louis, even down to small details.  The same cruelty, the same superstition, the same astrologers, the same low-born associates, the same residence outside the influence of the great cities—­a parallel could hardly be more complete.  If you have not supped too full of horrors when you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author’s account of Peter the Great.  What a land!  What a succession of monarchs!  Blood and snow and iron!  Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons.  And there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which gives it a grotesque horror of its own.  We have had our Henry the Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent rule in Russia.

Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder has as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know.  It is Washington Irving’s “Conquest of Granada.”  I do not know where he got his material for this book—­from Spanish Chronicles, I presume—­but the wars between the Moors and the Christian knights must have been among the most chivalrous of exploits.  I could not name a book which gets the beauty and the glamour of it better than this one, the lance-heads gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale fires glowing on the crags, the stern devotion of the mail-clad Christians, the debonnaire and courtly courage of the dashing Moslem.  Had Washington Irving written nothing else, that book alone should have forced the door of every library.  I love all his books, for no man wrote fresher English with a purer style; but of them all it is still “The Conquest of Granada” to which I turn most often.

To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are two exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new.  They are a brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has only two books.  This green-and-gold volume contains both the works of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady Wilde.  The first is “Sidonia the Sorceress,” the second, “The Amber Witch.”  I don’t know where one may turn for a stranger view of the Middle Ages, the quaint details of simple life, with sudden intervals of grotesque savagery.  The most weird and barbarous things are made human and comprehensible.  There is one incident which haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers with the villagers as to what price they will give him for putting some young witch to the torture, running them up from a barrel of apples to a barrel and a half, on the grounds that he is now old and rheumatic, and that the stooping and straining is bad for his back.  It should be done on a sloping hill, he explains, so that the “dear little children” may see it easily.  Both “Sidonia” and “The Amber Witch” give such a picture of old Germany as I have never seen elsewhere.