312 SHORT NOTICES April In the third volume of The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti hy Emissaries of Spain, during the years 1772-1776 (London : Hakluyt Society, 1919), Mr. Bolton Glanvill Corney gives an English translation of the diary of MAximo Rodriguez, a Spanish Limeuo who, having sailed to Tahiti and back in 1772-3 as a marine in the frigate Aguila, was sent again to that island by the viceroy of Peru in 1774-5. The Spaniards were alone on the island, among the natives, unsupported by any fleet and thus ' with no other refuge than God and our own conduct ', so that the diary is invalu- able as a record of native life and as a commentary on the works of Cook and the other early travellers. The editor has done his work with his usual excellent thoroughness. He has been lucky in * finds '. One of these is the old Tahitian mystic bowl which he has rediscovered at Madrid, and to him we owe excellent illustrations and the supplementary papers with which this book is enriched. A. F. S. A collection of letters written between February 1777 and December 1782 by Beaumarchais to his agent, Theveneau de Francy, is edited by M. Jules Marsan under the title Beaumarchais et les Affaires d'Amerique (Paris : Champion, 1919). It is intended to supplement Lomenie's Beau- marchais et son Temps, and M. Marsan has added to the letters the minimum running commentary needed. Beaumarchais had a double share in making the French Revolution ; by Le Mariage de Figaro he brought the old order in France into contempt, and by the assistance he organized for the American colonies in their struggle for independence he hastened the bankruptcy of the French government. In these letters he is seen in his capacity as man of affairs rather than as author, sending men and muni- tions to America, discussing ship-construction, complaining that the king of France and the congress of America both owe him money, scribbling to Francy denunciations of his opponents, resolutions to persist in his course. Beaumarchais was a remarkable man, and more than a mere watchmaker's son with ambitions ; if he had cared only for his own interests he would not have committed himself as deeply as he did to the support of the revolted colonies. His expenses were never fully repaid ; in 1807 his heirs received only a little more than one-third of the outstand- ing claim. The letters are well edited, and should prove usefiil for the study of the war of the American Revolution. E. M. W. M. Henri Welschinger's book, Les Martyrs de Septemhre (Paris : Victor Lecoffre, 1919), forms one of a series called Les Saints and is written in support of the arguments, already brought before a special committee, for the beatification of the 213 priests who perished in the September massacres. M. Welschinger is careful to point out that he is dealing only with the prisons of the Abbaye, the Carmes, St.-Firmin, and La Force, where the priests had been sent, and that they were but a small proportion of the 1,400 victims who were murdered in Paris alone ; but it is perhaps inevitable from the nature of the book that he should convey the impres- sion that the September massacres were an outbreak of religious persecu- tion, in short a second St. Bartholomew. He lays great stress on the fact that the priests were asked by their murderers whether they had taken
