The book is replete with vivid writing, and with sentences and paragraphs which stand out in the memory as marvels in the art of presenting the vital features of a subject with a few master-strokes. The story of the Crusades, the outline of the English conquest of India, and the short tale of the rise of the house of Rothschild, are masterpieces. Nowhere else is it possible to find in the same compass any description of the Crusades so profound in its appreciation of the motives behind them, so startling in the vigor with which the chief actors, and the chief events, are portrayed. Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that it is in the description of the Crusades that Mr. Adams is at his best. He is dealing with a giant movement of humanity; and he grasps not only the colossal outward manifestations, but also the spirit itself, and, above all, the strange and sinister changes which that spirit underwent. His mere description of the Baronies set up by the Crusaders in the conquered Holy Land, with their loose feudal government, brings them before the reader’s eyes as few volumes specially devoted to the subject could. It is difficult to write of a fortress and make a pen-picture which will always stay in the mind; yet this is what Mr. Adams has done in dealing with the grim religious castles, terrible in size and power, which were built by the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital as bulwarks against Saracen might. He is not only a scholar of much research, but a student of art, who is so much more than a mere student as to be thrilled and possessed by what he studies. He shows, with a beauty and vigor of style not unbecoming his subject, how profoundly the art of Europe was affected by the Crusades. It is not every one who can write with equal interest of sacred architecture and military engineering, who can appreciate alike the marvels of Gothic cathedrals and the frowning strength of feudal fortresses, and who furthermore can trace their inter-relation. The story of the taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders who followed the lead of the blind Doge Dandolo is told with an almost brutal ruthlessness quite befitting the deed itself. Nowhere else in the book is Mr. Adams happier in his insistence upon the conflict between what he calls the economic and the imaginative spirits. The incident sets well with his favorite theory of the inevitable triumph of the economic over the imaginative man, as societies grow centralized, and the no less inevitable fossilization and ruin of the body politic which this very triumph itself ultimately entails. The history of the English conquest of India is only less vividly told. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that one of Mr. Adams’s many merits is his contemptuous refusal to be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. He sees Macaulay’s greatness as a historian, and his essential truthfulness on many of the very points where he has been most sharply criticised.