These five historical dramas cover the flowering time of the Italian Renaissance from the rise to prominence of Savonarola (1492) to the last days of Michael Angelo (about 1560). While grouped round the leading figures who provide the titles—Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Julius II, Leo X, and Michael Angelo—the plays introduce almost every interesting character of the period. Nor are we only concerned with the great names; the author aims at catching the spirit of the people, and the thoughts and feelings of soldier, artisan, trader, and their womenfolk find ample voice in his pages. The Italian Renaissance is an epoch of peculiar interest to English readers, not least because of its profound influence on our own Elizabethan age. It is perhaps the most many-sided period in history: even fifth-century Greece scarcely contributed so much—or at any rate so much that has survived-to the world of politics, art, and thought. Now while this interest is amply reflected in contemporary literature, from the monumental work of Symonds down to the flotsam and jetsam of everyday fiction, there is one kind of man who more than an historian would show insight into this age, and that is a poet. It is as a poet’s work that Gobineau’s “Historical Scenes” recommend themselves to the public. But there are many kinds of poets; there is the religious and moral kind, there is the irreligious and sub-moral kind, and there is the super-religious and super-moral kind. Only the last-named can understand, can feel, can sympathise with such mighty figures as Cesare Borgia and Julius II—the religious poet being inclined to paint them as monsters, the sub-religious as freaks and neurotics. _Similia similibus_: equals can only be recognised by their equals, and Gobineau was himself a type of the Renaissance flung by destiny into an age of low bourgeois and socialist ideals. In a century swayed by romanticism and democracy, Gobineau was a classic and an aristocrat. He is a forerunner of Nietzsche (“the only European spirit I should care to converse with,” said Nietzsche of him in a letter), and as such is peculiarly fitted to deal with one of the few periods that was _not_ dominated by the moral law. For this reason Gobineau cannot fail to attract the large and evergrowing circle of students of Nietzsche in this country and America. “I can only add that this is a volume of serious import, worth reading from cover to cover, a book which even a jaded reviewer closes with a sigh of regret that he has not got to read it all over again.”—G. S. LAYARD in the _Bookman_.