ered some years ago amongst the Chancery Miscellanea of the Public Record Office, by no means equal in interest that famous collection. Yet they are of great interest, and Mr. Maiden, in his able preface, has skilfully pointed out in just what ways this is true. Richard Cely of Mark Lane and of Bretts in Essex, and his three sons, Richard, Robert and George, were merchants of the Staple doing business in London and constantly maintaining a junior member of the firm at Calais, where the staple for wool was situated in their time. They were well-to-do persons, whose business led them on considerable journeys and familiarized them with large affairs. Their correspondence, exceedingly well edited, illustrates the whole history of the woollen trade, from the gathering of wool (varied by courting) in the Cotswolds to its sale to Flemish and other merchants (varied apparently by smuggling, privateering and possibly piracy) at Calais. The editor's preface elucidates fully the organization of the merchants of the Staple and the operations of the woollen trade, and the relations which it bore during these years to the complications of international politics. There are brief appendixes on contemporary coinage and on the contemporary wool marts.
Mr. Charles H. Firth has edited for the same society The Narrative of General Venables, with an Appendix of Papers relating to the Expedition to the West Indies and the Conquest of Jamaica, 1654-1655 (Longmans, pp. xli, 180). Venables's narrative is derived from two manuscripts in the British Museum. Its object is to vindicate his own conduct as general, and to show that the disasters which befell the expedition were due to the mistakes and misconduct of Admiral Penn and others. He quotes a good number of letters in various support of his contention, and concludes with a refutation of the anonymous "Brief and Perfect Journal of the late Proceedings and Success of the English Army in the West Indies, by I. S., an Eyewitness," printed in the Harleian Miscellany, Vol. III. The appendixes contain the instructions given to those who were to prepare the expedition, the commission given to the commissioners who were to command it, the instructions given to Venables as general, a contemporary list of the forces, certain additional papers of Venables, a journal or series of letters relating to the expedition, from an anonymous manuscript in the Rawlinson collection, some extracts from the journal of one Henry Whistler, and certain pieces from the unpublished Thurloe MSS., among them a Spanish warning not to trespass, couched in strange English, which English sailors found on the deserted island of the Tortugas. Beside this illustrative matter, Mr Firth has supplied, in an excellent introduction, an account of the commissioners (of whom, it will be remembered, Edward Winslow was one), of the officers, of the forces, and of the events and mistakes of the expedition.
Essai sur le Systeme de Politique Étrangère de J. J. Rousseau: La Republique Confederative des Petits Etats, par. J. L. Windenberger, Professeur au Lycee de Chaumont. (Paris: Picard, pp. 308.) At a
