Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/394

 384 Revieius of Books tory continuously, but deals avowedly with selected periods. Twenty- two epochs are thus treated, beginning with the Britons and Saxons and coming down to the modern Empire. In the early part of the book one is disposed to cavil somewhat at the sense of proportion which gave to the Hundred Years' War more illustrative material than was thought necessary for the constitutional struggles of the preceding century. The Wars of the Roses are similarly magnified into undue importance. The Tudor and Puritan periods are treated with some fulness, and the selec- tions are well-chosen. They are almost entirely of a descriptive sort. The only statutory material for the Tudor period is a law against the keeping of sheep, 1534. Among other interesting selections are quo- tations from the reports of the Venetian ambassador, Giacomo Soranzo, a nevvs-letter to Wentworth, letters of Charles I. to Strafford, an extract from Lord Ashley's report on child-labor, and Mrs. Harris's description of the Indian mutiny at Lucknow. The nineteenth century is treated at greatest length, having over a hundred pages given it out of 465. Miss Kendall justifies this on the ground "of the great difficulty in gaining access to the original materials of the last three centuries. ' ' The make-up of the book is satisfactory save as respects the marginal annotations, which confuse notices of authors and authorities quoted with comments upon the text. There is a good index in which the names of authors are accented. Source- Book of Eitg/ish History, by Gu}' Carleton I ,ee. Ph. D. ( Henry Holt and Co., pp. 585.) This book is, for the main part, a repository of good material, well-selected. Part I. is a bibliography of sources, covering some 60 pages, and deserving especial mention because such lists might well be included in the prevalent source-book, and, as a rule, are not. The remaining 520 pages contain a varied collection of documents and extracts, which are rather institutional and legal than descriptive. The text of many important documents and statutes is given in full. Among these, one may mention the Constitutions of Clarendon, Magna Charta, the Statute of Praemunire, the Statute of Laborers, the Instrument of Govern- ment, and the Habeas Corpus Act. This is material the lack of which has been felt in similar compilations. The last 80 pages, dealing with the nineteenth century, are open to the objection of being largely taken from secondary material. This is at once unscholarly and unnecessary. Moles- worth's History of the Reform, Gammage's History of the Chartist Move- ment, and Levi's History of British Commerce cannot be classed as sources, and it is not apparent why extracts from these and similar works are in- cluded in Mr. Lee's collection. The Ccly Papers ; Selections from the Correspondence and Afemoranda of the Cely Family, APerchants of the Staple, A. D. 1475-1488. p:dited for the Royal Historical Society by Henry Elliot Maiden (Longmans, pp. liii, 214). Inevitably the comparison of the Paston Letters suggests itself in connection with such a publication. The Cely papers, discov-