Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/152

 144 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January with the courtiers. The feud between Turenne and Louvois he follows with fatiguing minuteness. This, however, has its use as illustrating the growth of that system of supervision and control from Versailles which became more and more stringent as the king and his minister became more and more assured of their own infallibility, and which accounts so largely for the ill success of the later wars of the reign. A very different topic, the conversion of Turenne to the Roman faith, is also treated exhaustively. Here no positive conclusion can be reached. We cannot be sure of men's motives ; we know that they are usually complex. Turenne may have acted from conviction ; but he secured himself in the king's favour and gained much for his relatives. Turenne's personal character, what M. Picavet unkindly calls the legend of Turenne, is also analysed. The amiable and wellnigh faultless hero, the virtuous and feeling man, as they would have said in the eighteenth century, suffers some diminution in the process ; but there remains a simple, masculine personage, comparatively free from the worst faults of his rank and of his period. M. Picavet is not always accurate when treating of foreign affairs. James, duke of York, who was then fighting on the Spanish side, is styled Turenne's old companion in arms at the battle of the Dunes (p. 20). Lord Crafts, the English ambassador (p. 113), should be Lord Crofts The date of the Navigation Act is wrongly given as 1655 (p. 116). It is a graver mistake to speak of Sardinia as a state in the days of Turenne (p. 140). ' War of Devolution ', a term elsewhere correctly used, is on p. 257 applied to the war with Holland which began in 1672. F. C. Montague. The Danish West Indies under Company Rule, 1671-1754. By Waldemar Westergaard, Ph.D. (New York : Macmillan, 1917.) This volume of nearly 400 pages owes its inspiration to the late Professor H. Morse Stephens, whose introduction clearly and concisely indicates the results of the author's labours as bearing upon the general history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The transference of the Danish islands to the United States in 1917 accounts for the addition of a supple- mentary chapter briefly surveying the years after 1755. Dr. Westergaard, an American scholar of Danish extraction, hopes to complete the work in two further volumes. This lavish dedication of space to the annals of about 132 square miles of islet admits of every kind of annotation, appendix, and embellishment, though it is unfortunate that, owing to war precautions in Denmark, the engravings of coins have had to be omitted. The chief 'source' has been the official records of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, which are piled high at the summit of the Public Record Office in Copenhagen, and but rarely disturbed. A few other manuscript collections and the available printed literature have been handled with obvious diligence and technical skill. Dr. Westergaard's History, in all human likelihood, is final. The matter-of-fact cheerfiJness of the narrative hardly conceals the sordid iniquity of these eighty years. The prime object was sugar ; the