278 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April exceptionally vigilant in the days of the Quadruple Alliance, and of the Prussian F. Bonnet, whose efforts were unceasing to keep up a bonne intelligence which, if we may say so, had not always recognized the elective affinity then drawing his government and the British together. In his long account of Jacobitism in a period which, in 1719, seemed to end with a final overthrow of its hopes, the historian has largely used the Stuart Papers (of which the Historical MSS. Commission's calendar nearly reaches this date), though well aware of the criticism their contents constantly demand. Of secondary sources of greater or less significance he has not failed to make constant use ; and we are not surprised that in his narrative of the complications which arose for British foreign policy in the last years of the Northern War and of the first appearance of Russia on the scene of the European ' family ' theatre he should ' once for all ' cite the admirable work of Mr. J. F. Chance, George I and the Northern War, as the most valuable of the extant aids to knowledge. In the few remarks that follow we must confine ourselves to one or two passages in which Professor Michael's present volume seems to us to throw light more or less novel on the progress of his theme. We should, in any case, think it unnecessary to dwell here upon the earlier chapters, which open with a very lucid exposition of the difficulties besetting the government of King George I in these years, because of its relations with tories and whigs respectively — between whom he had, in fact, no choice, as Cowper's advice had with a certain element of reluctance shown him ab initio — and because of the contention between the self -selected body of the whigs who (Marlborough being impossible) formed the triumvirate and its following, and "who in a large measure associated themselves with the Hanoverian interest and the whig malcontents. This contention, beginning with one in the field of foreign policy, became one of faction, and, together with the quarrel in the royal family, con- stitutes the very epoch of the party-conflict of the quadrennium narrated in this volume. The chapters which follow, on the moralists and deists, and on the Bangor controversy and the attempted repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, are full of interest, and the last-named incident actually makes part of the struggle between the government and Walpole (not, it is clear, altogether determined by factious motives). But it is obvious that the contents of these chapters, to a large extent, reach rather further back than the point in the narrative at which they are inserted ; and, to say nothing of Shaftesbury (a love principium), or of Addison, whose official pen we find, so late as 1717, proposing punitive measures against the papacy, or of Defoe, whom we meet with in the following year as the supporter of the war against Spain, Mandeville and his fable seem to detain us at rather unreasonable length in this excursus. Of the Quadruple Alliance, with which we enter at once in medias res, and the significance of this misnamed treaty and its genesis, Professor Michael had already spoken with notable effect in the closing portion of the first volume of his History. In its present section he goes back for a moment to the treaty itself — indeed, beyond it, to its proposed original form, so far as the preamble is concerned. The point is one of considerable
