Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/163

 1920 SHORT NOTICES 155 a detailed account of the history of the company which, under the active patronage of the duke of York, carried on English trade with West Africa from 1662 to 1672, when the task was taken up by the Royal African Company. Of the manuscript materials in the Public Record Office and the Rijksarchief at The Hague, Mr. Zook has made excellent use ; and he deals not only with the history of the company at home and of its settlements abroad, but also with the international disputes which led up to the second Anglo-Dutch war and with the troubles between the com- pany's agents and the West Indian planters over the supply of slaves. A few criticisms may be offered. Justice is hardly done to the con- nexion of the East India Company with the Guinea trade, and Mr. Zook does not seem to be aware of the documents at the India Office bearing upon this subject. The ' malaguetta ' of p. 71 should have been connected with the ' Guinea graines ' of pp. 3, 4 ; and it might have been explained that the ' Cape Corse ' which figures so prominently in the narrative is the Cape Coast of to-day. A map would have been of considerable assistance to the reader, and an index would also have been a useful addition. W. F. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to name any editorial task of a like character carried out with greater thoroughness and skill than are displayed by Dr. Paget Toynbee in his Supplement to the Letters of Horace Walpole (2 vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1918), which completes the late Mrs. Paget Toynbee's monumental edition of the letters. A hundred and ten letters are for the first time printed here, more than half of them coming from the manuscripts now owned by Sir Wathen Waller, to whose ancestor they were bequeathed by Mrs. Damer ; and many others, of which parts only had hitherto been published, are now given in full. Among the new letters from the Waller collection some written to Mann during Walpole's visit to Italy in 1740 give a lively picture of the doings and hopes of the pretender's party there and the excitement caused by the departure of Charles Edward from Rome on his journey to France. In another newly -printed letter to Lord Hertford, written from Paris in 1766, Walpole records with amusing irony how on March 3 Louis XV cowed the parlia- ment of Paris, which had dared to protest against the royal treatment of the parliament of Brittany. We have, too, a large number of letters which, though now printed elsewhere, were either not printed when Mrs. Toynbee produced her edition, or for some other reason were not included in it. Of these some letters to Henry Fox, first Lord Holland, printed by Lord Ilchester in his Letters to Henry Fox (1915), may be noticed here. Dr. Toynbee's foot-notes to the letters are all that could be desired. In some he gives us letters in reply ; one of these from Lord Holland, of 11 June 1765, not previously printed and existing in the Waller collection, is in reply to Walpole's account of the ministerial crisis and changes of the month before, which included Holland's loss of the pay-office, and it represents the writer in a pleasanter light than that in which he often appears. A great many letters to Madame du Deffand, which have already appeared in Mrs. Toynbee's Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand a Horace Walpole (1912), complete all that is known to exist of Walpole's side of the