Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/622

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614 SHORT NOTICES company. The educated youth of Siena or Florence banded themselves into groups, called by absurd names, Intronati, Rozzi, Storditi. They played forfeits, or Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, they asked riddles and made verses, and above all they talked. ' Which is the greater passion, love or hate ? '

  • Is it better to love a scholar or a soldier ? ' these and kindred subjects

were debated with quite unwearied zest. Dr. Crane has done good service in bringing the extensive literature of his subject, scattered for the most part in Italian learned periodicals, within reach of English readers. It is probably through an oversight that Delia Torre's Storia delV Accademia Platonica di Firenze, a useful work published just twenty years ago, is not included among the authorities cited on p. 101. C. M. A. Whatever criticisms may be made of the work of the Carnegie Trust for the Scottish Universities, no one can deny that it has deserved well of students of colonial history by assisting in the publication of Mr. G. P. Insh's interesting monograph on Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620-1686 (Glasgow ' MacLehose, 1922). In dealing with Sir William Alexander's scheme the author is treading on ground, to some extent, familiar ; but few will be the readers who had previous knowledge of the attempt of Lochinvar to found New Galloway in Cape Breton Island. The chapter on ' the years between ' well brings out the insistent and constant desire to found a Scottish colony in America, which finally culminated in the Darien scheme. It is not the fault of Mr. Insh tha,t his story is one of continuous failure, fitly culminating in the destruction by the Spaniards of Stuart's Town in South Carolina. It should be noted that Mr. Insh seems to have estab- lished that the first settlement of the Scots at Port Royal was made in 1629 ; and not, as has been generally believed, in 1628. He conjectures that in that year an attempt was made to found a colony at Tadoussac in Canada. A promised volume dealing with the Darien scheme will be awaited with interest. H. E. E. It was the intention that the chapters relating to Swedish colonization, written by Professor C. de Lannoy, forming a part of the Histoire de ^Expansion Coloniale des Peuples Modernes, at which he and Professor H. Vander Linden were at work, should be incorporated in a volume by the latter, dealing with French colonial expansion, up to 1789. Unhappily the destruction at Louvain of M. Vander Linden's manuscript and of the notes on colonial history that he had been making for some twenty-five years has given a rude set-back to the whole undertaking. Meanwhile Suede (Bruxelles : Lambertin, 1921) represents in a pamphlet form these Swedish chapters. It is doubtless true that Swedish colonization ended in failure. But, as M. de Lannoy says, failures are often as instructive as are successes. The moral cannot too often be enforced that colonization requires, if it is to achieve results, special economic, geographical, and political conditions in the parent state. It seems unfortunate that among the list of authorities no mention is made of the standard eighteenth- century History of New Sweden by Israel Acrelius, the English translation of which forms vol. xi of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Penn- sylvania, 1874. H. E. E.