Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/315

 1921 SHORT NOTICES 307 The useful and methodical discussion of the text and manuscripts of Evelyn's diaries which the Rev. H. Maynard Smith prefixes to his Early Life and Education of John Evelyn (Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, vol. xi. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1920) raises hopes which are not fulfilled. The volume contains the text of the diaries down to 1641, with a full critical apparatus comparing the different printed versions. Through no fault of the editor's a comparison with the manuscripts cannot how be made. But the amount of Evelyn's text here given barely exceeds twenty pages, and the rest of the volume is taken up with a commentary more than seven times as long. We have noticed an excessive number of errors : on p. 147 alone, for instance, are two obvious misprints (' cherisheb ' and ' Sohms ' for ' Solms ') and a reference to ' Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, p. 76 ', which is likely to be wrong for a good many of the twenty editions of that work. What is worse, the annotation is not devoted to elucidating the text, but to a discursive heaping together of facts, many of which are as remote from the subject as the statements that the dome of St. Paul's can be seen from the top of Leith Hill (p. 12) or that the posses- sion of the castle of Arundel carries with it the dignity of an earldom (p. 98). M. The first volume of Mr. Johan E. Elias's Schetsen uit de Geschiedenis van ons Zeewezen, which was noticed in this Review four years ago, 1 dealt with Dutch naval affairs down to the outbreak of the first English war. Before passing beyond that date, the author has produced two more volumes dealing with the earlier period, Het Voorspel van den Eersten Engelschen Oorlog (The Hague : Nijhoff, 1920). The title is somewhat misleading, since, instead of tracing all the varied disputes in different spheres which culminated in the war, the author confines himself as far as possible to the economic relations of the two powers, a limitation which has been forced on him by the quantity of his materials. The arrangement of the chapters is systematic and not chronological. The first volume deals with European affairs in four chapters, of which the first three cover the development of the Dutch trade and fisheries and their, influence on foreign policy ; navigation, industry, labour and capital as factors in Dutch imperialism; and the development of British trade, especially with the Netherlands, from Edward III to Cromwell. In these it is easier to maintain the economic attitude than in the fourth chapter ' Mare Liberum — Mare Clausum ', where the controversy cannot be described without reference to legal and diplomatic sources. The second volume has four chapters on affairs outside Europe, the division being geographical. Except for some resolutions of the Amsterdam and Edam municipalities, the author does not seem to have used new manuscript sources, so that he does not add much absolutely new information on the obscure passages of the economic history. What he has aimed at doing is to survey the considerable mass of monographs which have been written in the last twenty or thirty years on and around his subject, and this task he has carried out with much skill and judgement. He gives the best existing introductory account of the relations between the English and the Dutch 1 Ante, xxxii. 622. X2