622 SHORT NOTICES October guese texts of the truce itself, and the formal communications exchanged between the ambassador and the Dutch. These and other Dutch records which he has used enable him to show that, in spite of contemporary criticisms, the conclusion of a truce on both sides of the line was as much as Portugal could reasonably expect, and the shortcomings of the ambassador were of minor importance. H. In dealing with the fourth embassy of King John IV to the states- general, Mr. Prestage, who, with Senhor Pedro de Azevedo, has edited for the Academy of Lisbon the first volume of Correspondencies Diplomdtica de Francisco de Sousa Coutinho (Coimbra : Imprensa da Universidade, 1920), has to deal with a far greater mass of material. Nearly four hundred quarto pages are occupied by Sousa Coutinho 's letters for the years 1643 to 1646, nearly all of them addressed to the king, the secretary of state, and the Conde da Vidigueira, ambassador in Paris. The memorials presented by Sousa Coutinho to the states-general are to be published by another editor. The first period of his mission was anxious and indecisive. Neither side abode faithfully by the truce of 1641, and beyond the line there was a state of unofficial war such as was not uncommon in that age. Although Sousa Coutinho's nominal objects were a definitive peace and the restitution of the old Portuguese possessions by the Dutch, the time for these was not yet. Eight years later the peace came after open war and when the destinies of the disputed places had been settled locally by arms : in the meantime the Dutch ' rezao de estado ' was based on pro- crastination. In his secondary task of advancing the Portuguese claim to representation at the Congress of Munster, Sousa Coutinho suffered much from an exasperating colleague, and the general tenor of his negotiations was not smooth. He was the only Portuguese representative of the time who can be called a professional diplomatist, an able and human figure, and an old friend of his master. The main value of his long, though not uninteresting dispatches is in filling out the details of his own work : to the general history of the time they do not seem to add much that is new. They and the illustrative documents in the appendixes have been edited with care and judgement, the brief notes identifying the persons named and solving most of the difficulties of the text. We could wish that the list of errata, even now not absolutely complete, had been a little shorter, and it would be worth while to give in a later volume a facsimile of one of the letters to Vidigueira. Mr. Prestage's lucid intro- ductory account of the negotiations serves as a guide to the contents of the volume : we cannot repine if the editors have been unable to include summaries of the individual letters. Economy was necessary, and it was wise to omit these and give the letters in full instead of abridging the text and expanding the auxiliary apparatus. H. In his book on Kongeloven, dens Tilblivelse og Plads i Samtidens Natur- og Arveretlige UdviJcling (Copenhagen : Hagerup, 1920), Professor Knud Fabricius follows up his biography of the great Danish publicist,' Peter Schumacher Grifienfeld (1910), with a study on his most remarkable work, the so-called BoyalLawof 1665, which has not without reason been called
