The fundamental document for Diocletian's provincial re-organization is a list of the Dioceses and Provinces of the Roman Empire preserved in a MS. at Verona, which though printed by Maffei in 1742 escaped the notice of historians till Mommsen published it in 1862 in the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy, with a commentary in which he easily showed that it is the earliest provincial list we have, earlier than the lists of the Breviarium of Festus, of Polemius Silvius, of the Notitia Galliarum, and the Notitia Dignitatum. He attributed it to A.D. 297, and argued that it represented the new organization of Diocletian which he assumed to have been completed in that year. This conclusion, I believe, is wrong, though, like some other errors of Mommsen, it has been very generally accepted. He admitted, however, that strictly speaking the lower limit of the date of the List is A.D. 342 and the upper A.D. 297. For the present purpose it is enough to point this out; I hope to discuss the question fully in another place.

The study of medieval Italian history in England has always tended to the picturesque in character. This is an old tradition; we see it already in Elizabethan plays; and may trace it through Byron and Browning to modern writers of biographies and histories of a time or of a city. Stodgily virtuous in Dennistoun, rhetorically philosophical in Symonds, stirring and graphic in Heywood, Clio has here had the opportunity to be a melodramatic muse, and has used it to the full. The moving accident has been almost all her theme, and she seems at times to have found in it the pleasure that Charles Lamb did in Restoration plays, the escape to the country “where no cold moral reigns.” This attitude is natural enough when we consider that Italian history comes to us in the light of the Renaissance and of Dante, of a time when personality in its most exuberant forms not only had free play in life, but full record, and record which is living literature and not a mere “source.”

From the confessionals “we” hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies.

Anotion seems to be gaining currency that the methods of diplomacy as now pursued differ in some way from those of what may be called the Victorian period. It has perhaps arisen from the first of President Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, as constituting the only possible programme for giving peace to the world, set forth in these words: “Open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international undertakings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” The Fourteen Points were accepted by both Germany and the Allies and Associated Powers of the Entente as “the necessary terms of such an armistice as would fully protect the interest of the peoples involved and ensure to the associated Governments the unrestricted power to safeguard and enforce the details of the peace to which the German Government had agreed”. And it has been rather hastily assumed that this agreement had put an end to the secret diplomacy which hitherto had distorted the policy of the European Allies. A paper read by Sir Maurice Hankey before the British Institute of International Affairs on November 2, 1920, confirmed the view that diplomacy by conference between the principal Ministers of the Powers concerned has to an important extent superseded the old way of conducting international relations through professional diplomatists accredited by the governments concerned, and that this change was brought about by the World War.

Though historians are still waiting for Holstein's papers, enough material has accumulated since his death in 1909 to attempt a sketch of the man who had the largest share in the control of German foreign policy from the fall of Bismarck in 1890 till his own retirement in 1906. During his lifetime his name was scarcely known even to his countrymen; but the Memoirs of his colleagues Otto Hammann and Baron von Eckardstein, to mention only the two principal witnesses, have thrown a flood of light on the Éminence Grise of modern Germany, who, like Père Joseph, loved to work in the dark and preferred the reality to the pomp of power.