Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/151

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 143 1 January 1553. The period covered is eighteen months, down to the end of June 1554. The first kind of information to be got from the return is a list of the names of persons engaged in this commerce. M. Van der Essen prints about 320 names of foreign merchants, of which about three hundred are Spanish and Portuguese, seventeen Italian, and two German, those of the Fuggers and Bonaventure Bodecker. Besides these are 190 names of merchants native to the Low Countries : a proportion which seems to show that the greater part of this trade was still in the hands of Spanish and Portuguese merchants established at Antwerp and that they were not yet relinquishing it for the trade of the Indies, while, on the other hand, the commerce of Antwerp was not nearly all in the hands of foreigners. These conclusions correct those of some former writers. It is less interesting to notice that most of the hundred and fifteen ship-masters and carriers by land (to the neighbouring ports) are Netherlanders born. Five are English, though some of their names are hard to recognize. The only instances of specialization by merchants are the almost complete control of the export of copper by the Fuggers and the predilection of some houses for trading in books. From the total return of the duty it is not possible to infer anything more exact than that the export trade to Spain and Portugal made up ' une part importante ' of the business of the port, and, although M. Van der Essen says that the period of eighteen months is long enough to justify general conclusions, it should be added that the value of these lists and figures will increase in proportion with the publication of others with which they can be supplemented and compared. A curious paper of a slightly later date printed from the archives of his family by the duque de Alba in the Boletin de la Real Academia de Historia for November 1921 (Ixxix. 460 fE.), though of far less value, deserves in this connexion to be mentioned. G. N. C. Professor Hyder E. Rollins, of New York University, has been fortunate in his gleanings and diligent as an editor, though he would have done well to furnish his Old English Ballads, 1553-1625, chiefly from Manuscripts (Cambridge : University Press, 1920), with ampler notes. He seems to assume that his readers will have the special knowledge of the student of ballads. From rare broadsides and from manuscripts, most of which he does not describe except by their library number, he has collected seventy-five ballads, and in his introduction he gives the most interesting of all, a fragment of twenty lines from the British Museum on the Cornish rising of 1548. Most of the ballads concern English literature rather than history, but some twenty which express sympathy with the Roman side under Mary and Elizabeth are of real historical interest, and of greater merit than those of the other side. Among a multitude of religious and moralizing ballads it is interesting to find one on the betrayal of Edward, duke of Buckingham, which is evidence of the interest in English history excited by Holinshed's Chronicle. C. The volume of Early Travels in India, 1583-1619 (London : Milford, 1921), which Mr. William Foster has edited, contains the narratives of seven Englishmen who travelled in Northern and Western India during the