Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/474

 466 SHORT NOTICES July therefore turn for a valuation of the various manuscripts of the Life, including Harleian 6382, and for a discussion of the authorship, which formerly was credited to Richard Hall, to Father van Ortroy's edition. J. E. N. The main thesis of Father J. H. Pollen's brief study of The Counter- Reformation in Scotland will command universal assent. Owing to the political situation, especially to the existence of the Stuart claim to the English throne, Scotland occupied a position of unusual prominence on the European stage during the second half of the sixteenth century, and her solution of the religious problem was a question of European impor- tance. Far more disputable is the author's contention that the Jesuit attempt to interfere in the solution was conducted with religious weapons alone. Indeed a presentable case can be made only by rigidly suppressing the political activities of Persons, and by describing the Jesuit priests as free agents who acted on their own responsibility. Even so, it appears on p. 35 that the movements of Father Holt were directed by the Spanish ambassador. The nature of the book, which is a work of edification as well as a work of history, precludes the publication of notes, but the authorities are usually cited in the text, and the author, though working on a small scale, gives an eminently clear account of the labours of the Jesuit missionaries in Scotland. The slips are few. The Graham stronghold of Fintry is in Forfarshire ; the Aberdeenshire Fintray seems to have been in the hands of a Johnston at this period. And ' perfervidum Scotoruin genus ', on p. 36, is an unusual variation of Buchanan's ' Scotorum prae- fervida ingenia '. J. D. M. Much has been written of the evils of the naval administration under the first two Stuarts, and probably not enough account has been taken of the considerable difficulties in its way and of the very real interest that was displayed in navigation and naval construction ; an age which possessed Sir William Monson and Phineas Pett, Captain Best and Sir John Pennington, cannot be said to be wholly barren. One manifestation of this interest is to be found in the number of short treatises that were produced on matters of naval technique. Many of these have never been printed, and the Society for Nautical Research deserves the thanks of all those who are interested in naval history for undertaking to publish such works, in a series of which the first number is a Treatise on Rigging (The Society for Nautical Research : Occasional Publications, no. 1, 1921), edited by Mr. R. C. Anderson. The treatise consists of a detailed and classified account of the masts, sails, and rigging of an early seventeenth- century ship, and of the purpose which each component part was intended to serve. Instead of attempting a critical edition with elaborate notes, the editor has contented himself with producing an exact transcript of the Treatise interleaved with blank pages, so that, as he says in his introduction, ' readers may insert their own notes or diagrams, when the various diffi- culties have been discussed and explained in The Mariner's Mirror '. This decision is undoubtedly wise, for it would be almost impossible so to annotate a technical treatise of this description as to strike the mean