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 472 SHORT NOTICES July this collection would equal its predecessor in value for general history : what it does, for the most part, is to supply links that were wanting to the continuity of the correspondence and additional details in the history of well-known persons and events. The letters are written by a great variety of people. Besides the pensioner's own relations and political friends, there are independent political correspondents like Justus de Huybert of Zierikzee, whose letters do not outlast the provincial disagreements of 1654, spies of different kinds (pp. 70, 120, &c), academic dignitaries who write about the fortunes of Cartesianism (pp. 192 ff., 315 ff.), and, of course, many applicants for offices for themselves or their friends. The most important body of letters comes from Koenraad van Beuningen on his mission to Denmark in 1656-8, and this forms a separate section of more than a hundred pages. A few new letters are added to the correspondence of other diplomatists, and the remainder of the volume, although mainly, is by no means wholly of purely Dutch interest. The editing reaches the high standard of which Dr. Japikse's name is a guarantee. Two careful tables of the letters are given, one in chronological order and the other under the names of the writers. . G. N. C. American historians, having to a great extent made good the ground of their own colonial history, are more and more entering the preserves of the English West Indies. The more satisfactory it is to note an English work, The Development of the Leeward Islands under the Restoration, 1660-88 (Cambridge : University Press, 1921), which reaches the level of the most painstaking American investigators. Mr. C. S. S. Higham's studies were interrupted by the war, which perhaps accounts for a slight want of cohesion noticeable sometimes in the different parts. The strongest feature of the book is the use made of the papers of Thomas Povey in the British Museum, and of the Stapleton and Jeaffreson MSS. Mr. Higham may have been well advised in not confining his efforts to dealing with the life and governorship of Sir W. Stapleton ; but with his command of the necessary material he might have dealt a little more fully with the career of one of our most distinguished forgotten worthies ; and while he shows praiseworthy diligence in going to the fountain-head of the Jeaffreson MSS. instead of being content with the letters reprinted in A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century, he might have produced, even from the latter, a more living picture of the everyday life of the times than he has attempted. The treatment of the subject of the Laws of Trade seems hardly up to the level of the rest of the volume. Still, with some limitations, the book is an extremely sound and satisfactory piece of work, and those interested in the subject of colonial history will look forward with pleasure to future studies from Mr. Higham in this field. H. E. E. Mr. Geoffrey Callender has edited in two volumes The Life of Sir John Leake, by Stephen Martin-Leake (Navy Kecords Society, 1920). The admiral who twice relieved the hard-pressed British garrison of Gibraltar in 1704 and 1705, who took a leading part in the capture of Barcelona and thereafter relieved it (when retaken and strongly held by the French and their partisans), and crowned his career by the capture of Sardinia and