Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/156

 148 SHORT NOTICES January In Le Marquis de Cavoye, 1640-1716 (Paris : Champion, 1920), M. Adrien Huguet gives us a very carefully written biography of ' un grand marechal de logis ' of Louis XIV's court. Cavoye's duties were to superintend the assignment of apartments at Versailles and at other places where the monarch might be in residence, a somewhat thorny task when some of those to whom they were assigned would consider their dignity com- promised by the difference of a few cubic feet of space or by the character of the view from the windows. In this task he had twelve assistants, each bearing as emblem of office 'a cane as a major does' (p. 287) or ' a stick with a silver top '. A specially intricate duty was that of deciding whether, in chalking on the door the name of the person to whom an apartment had been assigned, the words ' Pour Monsieur un tel ' or simply ' Monsieur un tel ' should be inscribed, the former being reserved for princes of the blood, cardinals, and foreign princes, the latter for people of less exalted degree. On the whole, it is difficult to be patient with a book of this kind. It is infinitely better printed than most books of the present time and the paper is of pre-war standard. It is elaborately furnished with documents and includes beautifully clear reproductions of Cavoye's handwriting. In externals, it is a model of what a book should be. But the subject is totally unworthy of the elaborate care bestowed upon it, and one cannot imagine that any people other than the descendants of the marquis can really be interested in it. The book would be justifiable if printed for private circulation. It is not that M. Adrien Huguet is unversed in seventeenth-century French history, and, judging by the scholarly care lavished on this book, one would welcome from its author a monograph on a subject of greater interest or importance. F. Dr. William Crooke, C.I.E., has edited in three volumes, with an intro- duction and notes, Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod's Annals and Antiquities ofRajasthan (London : Milford, 1920). The two original volumes of Tod's Annals appeared in 1829 and 1832 and were dedicated to King George IV and King William IV respectively. For nearly a hundred years the work has held its place as the standard history of the Rajput states at the critical period when their relations with the British power were finally determined. It has been reprinted several times ; it appeared in a popular form in 1914 ; and the great desideratum, a scholarly edition, is now supplied in the series of classical works on Indian subjects published by the Oxford University Press. In accordance with the general scheme of this series the text has been preserved almost entire, but it has been edited by a most competent authority, Dr. Crooke, whose introduction and notes enable the reader to distinguish between what is of permanent value in the Annals and what is now merely of interest as marking a stage in the progress of scholarship. Tod's historical and ethnographical views were in advance of the learning of his time, but they were necessarily speculative. A firm basis for early Indian history and for Indian ethnography had not yet been secured by the decipherment of the ancient inscriptions and by a compara- tive study of the physical characteristics, languages, and institutions of existing peoples. In the early years of the nineteenth century the Rajputs, situated between the spheres of influence of the Marathas and the British