1 3 2 Reviews of Books void. English scholars have done nothing in years upon the relations of their country to Louis XIV. Few of the English foreign state papers have yet seen the light, and many have not even been examined in their manuscript form by his- torians. In the Calendar of State Papers, only the Venetian Archives have been explored beyond the year 1600. Ranke made considerable use of the English foreign state papers in viriting his History of England, principally in the Seventeenth Century, and the same may be said of Lingard; but the volume of these papers in the Record Office is so great that, under the present circumstances, it is impossible for any student, however diligent, to penetrate the mass of them. Few of them have been printed. There are private editions of the Lexington papers and Grimblot in 1848 published the Letters of William III. and Louis XIV. in two volumes. The Camden Society in 1859 published the Savile Correspondence, which throws valuable light upon the history of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; in 1874 it published Letters to Sir Joseph Williamson, two vols., and Mr. Curran has lately edited the Despatches of an English Agent in Paris in the Reign of Louis XIV. for the Royal Historical Society. May one not now hope that balance may be given the Calendars of State Papers by resuming the long- arrested publication of those pertaining to foreign affairs, which have yet advanced no farther than 1580, while the Domestic Calendar is well down through the seventeenth century? In the main, the history of the relations of England and France in the seventeenth century is as yet imperfectly known. The Historical Manu- scripts Commission has helped somewhat by printing summaries of certain correspondence, as in the case of the two Montagues, Ralph and Charles, dukes of Manchester, each of whom was an ambassador in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV. (1669, 1676, 1699; see Hist. MSS. Comm., I. 193; IV. 245: l. 316; VII. 207, 418; VIII. 35, 47; X. Part V., 130). The same is true of 'ernon, secretary of state in 1698-1699. But the Egerton MSS. and the B.M. Additional MSS. abound in unpublished letters of his. We sorely need a life of the earl of Sunderland; some of his letters are in the Shrewsbury correspondence ; others have been published by Groen van Prinsterer, Archives de la Maison d'Orangc- Nassau, n. s., vol. '. ; and by Harris, Life of William III. But there are unpublished letters of Sunderland in B.M. Additional MSS. 28,094, 25,079, 25,082, 25,569. The Skelton papers too ought to be published. Skelton was English ambassador at Vienna and Venice, and warned James II. of William of Orange's designs upon England, being hand in glove with Barillon, Louis XIV. 's ambassador in London. There is a mass of his papers in both the Harleian MSS. and the B.M. Additional MSS. The history of the reign of Louis XIV. needs many more such works as Mignet's mighty compilation of documents upon the Spanish succession. In the light of all those facts, it may be appreciated how great a
