274 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April and adopted the ideas of the philosophers. But this intercourse was attended with certain disadvantages. The noble seldom felt that men who owed everything to their own talent were his equals. The literary man had all the irritability of his class, and was nettled by the condescend- ing airs of noble patrons. Intimacy often bred antipathy, and those men of letters who owed most to friends among the nobility were foremost- in the attack upon the order. The passion for the theatre, then so general, led to many scandals. Still more fatal to the noblesse was the passion for gambling, a vice which equalized and confounded all classes. In the endeavour to repair the losses of extravagance, the nobles of the court engaged more and more in financial speculation, which often proved a further cause of impoverishment and discredit. Most fatal of all to the noblesse in an age when the spirit of equality was always becoming stronger, were the occasional acts of personal violence against inferiors which went either unpunished or at least without adequate punishment. The story here told at length of Victor-Marie-Nicholas Ysore, marquis of Pleumartin, affords a curious illustration of what might be done so late as the middle of the eighteenth century. In his third part, which treats of the war against the noblesse, M. Carre is writing of matters so often handled before that there is little room for novelty. The discussion as to how the states-general should be con- stituted, the easy victory of the third estate when they met, the outbreak of anarchy in the provinces, the growth of emigration, the abolition of privileges and of titles are again described in much detail, which does not, however, modify the general outline of older narratives. M. Carre reminds us that many nobles took service under the revolutionary govern- ments, and that many continued to live obscurely in the provinces, although reduced to the direst want by the loss of their manorial rights. The fourth and concluding part sketches the history of the ci-devant nobles under the rule of the first consul and emperor. F. C. Montague. Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations from April 1704 to February 1708/9, preserved in the Public Record Office. (London : Stationery Office, 1920.) Students of American and colonial history have long looked forward with interest to the promised publication of the journals of the old board of trade, and their expectation of assistance in the investigation of the history of Britain's first colonial empire cannot fail to be realized in ample manner in this, the first volume of the series. It covers four volumes of the bound journals in the Record Office, and prints them as they stand without alteration or abridgement. Under the earlier plan adopted for publication the entries of the proceedings of the commissioners for trade and plantations from their commencement down to 1704 were extracted and included under their respective dates in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial. There they are entangled amidst the abstracts of letters and papers of all kinds that form the mass of the colonial collections. This plan obscured the value of the entries so much as to deprive the journal of a very large part of its value for those who were unable to consult its
