280 REV WW 8 OF BOOKS April stood firm, with public opinion to fall back upon, whatever may have been his mental reservations as to the future, and as to the future congress on which, with regard to more points than one, Spain was allowing herself to set hopes. Austria's interest, in any case, was against any thought of this cession ; for,, should the future witness the close combination between France and Spain, which her experienced diplomatic agent Hoffmann foresaw, the British fleet and the British command of the Straits would be of the utmost importance to the position of his imperial master in Italy. In the chapters devoted to ' the Pretender and his (hardly merry) men ' and to the * relations between England and the Northern Powers ', the English reader will, for the reasons already hinted, find comparatively little that is, in the one case, new or, in the other, has not been exhaustively treated by a recent historian of our own. The characterization of the Old Pretender will attract many as a singularly fair and, at the same time, sympathetic portrait of the unfortunate prince, rather than by any fresh details about his fortunes ; for even the story of his wooing and winning Princess Clementina was not long since told to us at considerable length. Of Mar, too, our historian judges severely ; but he was no exception among the statesmen of the age of Walpole who contrived at times to face both ways. In the account of Admiral Norris's Baltic expeditions — a chapter of British annals possessing great interest from its naval as well as its more purely political aspect (difficult and even undesirable as it generally proves to attempt to keep the two asunder) — Professor Michael quite clearly answers the question succinctly put in his table of contents : ' Why was the Russian naval power not destroyed ? ' The reasons were essentially strategical ; but Sunderland's passionate protest against the loss of such an opportunity, though it was not shared by contemporary professional opinion, or even found a response in British public feeling at large in Norris's own day, cannot be said to have remained wholly unechoed. To a rather earlier date than this negative result belongs a very curious episode, to which we finally direct the attention of our readers, not so much by reason of its bearing upon the future history of the partition of Poland — already at this date, as Professor Michael reminds us, an idea perfectly familiar to contemporary politicians — but because it illustrates the occasional difference, here amounting to an antagonism, between the designs of Stanhope and those of Bernstorff, the leading spirit of the Hanoverian junta. The episode has been previously treated by Professor Michael in 'a separate essay, and his narrative is more especially founded on the correspondence of St. Saphorin, King George's envoy at Vienna, preserved in the Hanover archives. For it was of the very essence of the transaction that, properly speaking, it concerned him as elector of Hanover rather than as king of Great Britain. It was in the former capacity that, towards the close of the year 1718, he had negotiated a treaty of alliance with the emperor and with King Augustus II of Poland — but with him, again, only in his character of elector of Saxony. The immediate object of this alliance was to protect Poland, the ulterior to protect the empire, against the Russian peril. Prussia would only be involved in the matter
