Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/294

 286 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April from unpublished material in the Record Office and the archives of the French Foreign Office, on the four eventful years during which Prior attained a transient and, as it proved, a not wholly enviable eminence. A memorandum from Torcy supplements Prior's account of his secret mission to Paris in 1711 ; 1 his share in the protracted and complicated negotiations which followed is fully described ; and his innocence or rather ignorance of the overtures made to the Pretender is demonstrated from correspondence preserved in the French archives, part of which was for the first time published by Mr. Legg in a previous volume of this Review. 2 The last fact places Prior's subsequent misfortunes in a rather entertaining perspective. The succeeding whig ministers, confidently reckoning to find in him a valuable and a yielding repository of incriminating state secrets, haled him before their secret committee, where he was subjected to that ten hours' examination which he himself has so feelingly described. They bullied him, they imprisoned him, they even excepted him from the general amnesty of 1717. All was in vain. Prior divulged nothing what- ever for the excellent reason that his former masters and friends had prudently taken the precaution of leaving him nothing whatever to divulge. R. R. SEDGWICK. Letters of Members of the Continental Congress. Edited by E. C. BURNETT. Vol. i, 29 August 17744 July 1776. (Washington, D.C. : Carnegie Institution, 1921.) THE historical department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has done a very useful work in entrusting to the very competent hands of Dr. Burnett the task of collecting and editing the material that has sur- vived relating to the American Continental Congress of 1774-83. The published Journals cannot but be in the nature of dry bones which need the covering of contemporary letters and diaries to become imbued with life and meaning. It may seem, at first sight, that the present collection is, in one way, a little disappointing, though we are indeed promised better results in future volumes. What with the published writings of John Samuel Adams, the numerous biographies of those connected with the congress, and the documents published in Force's American Archives, the amount of manuscript material remaining to be unearthed, at least so far as these two first years are concerned, seems to have been of no very great impor- tance. At the same time there is great practical convenience in having such material under a single cover, instead of its being scattered in scores of volumes. It is accordingly inevitable that the publication of this volume should throw no startingly new light on the character of the congress. The personality of John Adams, as revealed by quotations from his Diary and from his letters, still holds the foremost place on the stage of the history ; though we can gather from the material here presented a clearer picture of the separate views of the more extreme and the more moderate parties at the congress. A letter, from the Lee Transcripts of the Virginia Historical Society, written by Carter Braxton, a New Hampshire delegate, 1 See ante, xxix. 525 ft. " Ante xxx. 501 ff.