have had to be copied from the manuscripts of the Public Record Office in London. But the printed journals of 1732 and 1734, and those of the new House of Burgesses which sat in 1736, 1738, May, 1740, and August, 1740, are excessively rare (a single copy existing in the case of five of them and only two copies of the other), and their final preservation by reprinting is quite as much an occasion for gratitude as the printing of any manuscript journal. The printing has been done in the same beautiful fashion as the preceding volumes, those for 17421776, and Mr. McIlwaine's editing is of the same scrupulous and competent character. Apropos of his remarks on the committee for courts of justice (p. xv), the present writer expects that examples earlier than 1727 will be found, since a committee of that name and character was a constant institution of the House of Commons from 1621 on, except for the period from 1640 to 1660, and the Virginian scheme of standing committees imitated closely that of the Commons.

Governor Gooch's administration had many of the merits of his contemporary Walpole's. Next to the governor's, the leading influence in public affairs was that of the speaker. John Holloway was succeeded as speaker in 1734 by Sir John Randolph, Randolph in 1738 by the unhappy John Robinson. The passage of the tobacco acts is the most important matter of business, the settlement of election cases and questions of privilege makes the most interesting reading. Very interesting, however, is the petition of the Burgesses in 1730 to the King in Council on the subject of grants and tenures in the Northern Neck (pp. 92-96); it presents a valuable summary of the history of an involved matter. Other exceptionally interesting matters are the passage in 1730 of the act exempting the German Protestants of Stafford County from the payment of parish levies, because they already supported a German minister-a beginning of toleration; the passage of militia acts and of acts for the benefit of the College of William and Mary; and in 1736 the enactment of a law making more precise the qualifications for the suffrage, the need of which had been made manifest by the devious courses pursued in many elections.

The Siege of Boston. By Allen French. (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1911, pp. xi, 450.) The author's object as stated in the preface is "to produce a brief and readable account of the Siege of Boston" . . . "to treat the subject as a single organic series of events". He acknowledges his obligation to Frothingham's Siege of Boston, and says that his indebtedness to other authorities is recognized in the foot-notes. Turning to the notes one finds the histories by Bancroft, Avery, Lodge, Trevelyan, Stedman, Sabine, and Wells, and the Memorial History of Boston. Beyond these and a half-dozen diaries, there is nothing. His researches have brought him little save "base authority. from others' books"-secondary books for the most part. There are very few new things to be found in the volume, and no new point of view. The language is smooth and moves easily on, but one may

"praise an eel with the same praise". The author has not even successfully emulated Macaulay, making his history take the place of the last novel on my lady's table. The style is merely readable, no more. C. H. VAN TYNE.

The Works of James Buchanan, comprising his Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence. Collected and edited by John Bassett Moore. Volume XII. Biographical. (Philadelphia and London, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1911, pp. xviii, 479.) Rather more than half of this, the concluding volume of Buchanan's writings, is filled with the apologia entitled Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, published in 1866. Besides this we have an autobiographical sketch for 1791-1828; the first part of the oration of July 4, 1815, found after the publication of the latter portion in volume I.; a biographical sketch by J. Buchanan Henry; and a paper reviewing the Administration book, by W. U. Hensel.

Buchanan's elaborate defence of his administration, withheld from immediate publication, he tells us, in order that he might not seem to embarrass Lincoln, has hardly received from historians the attention which it deserves. A perusal of it fifty years after the event does not, indeed, alter greatly the general verdict which has been rendered upon his course; but it at least makes his position clearer. Buchanan was no friend to slavery as an institution; but believing, as he did, that slavery was "imbedded in the Constitution", he opposed consistently and uncompromisingly every attempt to interfere with it. Throughout his public life he cherished bitter hostility to the Abolitionists, and puts his arraignment of them in the forefront of his apology. On the other hand, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas-Nebraska Act called out his condemnation, though as chief magistrate he found little to object to in the conduct of the pro-slavery government in Kansas. His course during the winter of 1860-1861, when he showed himself to be of the straitest sect of strict constructionists, should have surprised no one; being, as it was, of a piece with his public attitude from the beginning. He makes the most of Greeley's repeated public admission of the propriety of secession; and his criticism of Congress for its deliberate and culpable negligence in failing to make provision for strengthening the hands of the President, or putting the federal government in a position to maintain the Union or deal with rebellion. is a solid argument in his own justification. It is worth remembering that when Lincoln took the law into his own hands, in the spring and early summer of 1861, Congress was not in session, while Buchanan, with Congress sitting, could plead no such exigency as his authority. That Buchanan possessed either the intellectual or the moral qualities needed to deal with so great an upheaval as the Civil War, nothing in the whole twelve volumes of his writings tends to show; but the responsibility for the mistakes of the winter of 1860-1861 must be borne by Congress as well as by him.

Of the scholarly editorial work of this sumptuous edition one can speak only in praise. The index, admirably full, has been made by Jacob H. Goetz. WILLIAM MACDONALD.

Memorias del Coronel Manuel María Giménez, Ayudante de Campo del General Santa Anna, 1798–1878. [Documentos Inéditos ó muy Raros para la Historia de México, edited by Genaro García, tomo XXXIV.] (Mexico, Bouret, 1911, pp. 286.) Giménez was born at Cadiz in 1798, was sent to a military college when thirteen years of age, and before completing his studies received the "baptism of fire" in a battle against Soult. In 1818 he went to Mexico as a military engineer, and from that date lived an active and checkered life for about half a century, serving all sorts of governments from that of Spain to that of Maximilian. Though brave he seems to have been better qualified for business than for war, and apparently he was too honest, too faithful, and too little gifted as a politician for success in civil public affairs. His Memoirs might have been precious but are in fact only valuable. He did not begin to write until 1863, and seems to have relied almost wholly on his memory for the period before that date. Besides, he took pains to avoid giving offense (p. 125), and with such a rule one could not go far below the surface in describing the recent events. What we have, therefore, is an interesting personal sketch throwing. light upon some matters of no little public importance. Giménez began to serve Santa Anna as aide-de-camp at the time of the French war, 1838. After that he was almost always near him whenever the general figured in Mexico, wrote against his enemies, dedicated these Memoirs to him, and counted among the very few who stood by him to the end in spite of the blindness, poverty, and obscurity of the exdictator's last years. To his mind Santa Anna was a brave, great, and noble man, even though capable of ordering his innocent aide-de-camp banished from the capital as a scapegoat and pretending to know nothing about the affair (pp. 83, 85). This opinion should remind us to view the general with careful regard to the circumstances of the time and the character and capacity of the persons around him; but apparently Giménez was not admitted into all the recesses of his master's thought, and besides entertaining a sense of gratitude was one to be dazzled by Santa Anna's brilliancy no less than by Maximilian's affability and "august person" (pp. 161-163). To American scholars the Memoirs will have special interest on account of their statements with reference to our war against Mexico (pp. 96-115, 263– 267). As one illustration, the author says (p. 100) that great numbers of Santa Anna's troops, not accustomed to carry rations, threw aside on their way to the battlefield of Buena Vista the sacks of food with which they had been provided; and as another he gives us more information than perhaps any one else regarding the plan to overthrow Santa Anna that was formed at Mexico soon after the battle of Cerro Gordo (pp. 108-111). JUSTIN H. SMITH.

NOTES AND NEWS

AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The manuscript of volume I. of the Annual Report for 1910 has been sent to the Government Printing Office. The second volume, consisting of correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens and Howell Cobb, edited by Professor U. B. Phillips for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, is nearly ready. The Annual Report for 1909 has been read in page proof. The second volume of that for 1908 will shortly be issued, bound in two parts.

The association's Handbook has been issued to the members. The list of names of members is now accompanied by indications of their special lines of interest.

Both the Adams prize essay for 1909, Dr. Notestein's History of English Witchcraft, and the Winsor prize essay for 1910, Professor E. R. Turner's The Negro in Pennsylvania, are now in press and will be distributed to subscribers in the autumn.

The Report of the Committee of Five upon history in secondary schools, of the nature of a review of the Report of the Committee of Seven, published in 1899, has now been issued by the Macmillan Company in the form of a small book of 69 pages.

In the Original Narratives series Messrs. Scribner expect to issue in the autumn Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Jersey, edited by Dr. Albert Cook Myers. The next volume will be the Journal of Dankers and Sluyter, in revised translation, edited by Rev. B. B. James of Baltimore.

By typographical error the name of Miss Lucy M. Salmon, professor in Vassar College, was omitted from the list of the General Committee on page 475 of the last number of this journal. To the Committee upon the Certification of High School Teachers of History the name of Superintendent Charles E. Chadsey should now be added.

PERSONAL

Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson died at Cambridge on May 9 at the age of 87. His historical books for young people, his Larger History of the United States (1885), his English History for Americans (1893), his Massachusetts in the Army and Navy, 1861-1865 (1895, 1896), and his Life of Stephen Higginson (1907), were the only professed historical books in his long series of literary publications; but perhaps quite as important to history as any of them was his Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), which chronicled the unique and stirring experiences of his colonelcy.

Professor Frederick W. Mcore of Vanderbilt University died at Denver in the latter part of April, at the age of forty-seven. He had been connected with the faculty of Vanderbilt University since 1892, and had been a useful and influential teacher and an interested investigator of many problems in Southern history.

Professors Henry E. Bourne, Frank H. Hodder, Albert B. White, and Carlton H. Hayes will teach during the summer sessions at the University of Chicago, Professors John S. Bassett and Edward B. Krehbiel and Dr. James Sullivan at Columbia University, and Professor James W. Thompson at the University of Wisconsin.

Dr. William E. Lunt of Wisconsin has been appointed professor of history and political science at Bowdoin College, to which Mr. O. C. Hormell of Clark College goes as assistant professor.

Mr. H. W. V. Temperley of Peterhouse, Cambridge, will lecture at Harvard University on modern English history during the first half of the coming academic year.

Dr. Sydney Knox Mitchell has been promoted to an assistant professorship of history in Yale University.

Dr. Robert Livingston Schuyler has been appointed an assistant professor in the department of history at Columbia University.

At the University of Michigan the two departments of history have been united under the headship of Professor Van Tyne. Professor Ulrich B. Phillips has been called to the professorship vacated by Professor Paxson a year ago, and Dr. Edward R. Turner of Bryn Mawr College has been elected a professor of history to take the place made vacant by the retirement of Professor Richard Hudson. Dr. A. L. Cross has been advanced from a junior professorship to a professorship of English history.

Mrs. Lois Kimball Mathews of Wellesley College has been elected associate professor of American history and dean of women at the University of Wisconsin.

Professor St. George L. Sioussat has accepted a call from the University of the South to Vanderbilt University to take the chair of history made vacant by the death of Professor Frederick W. Moore.

Professor Edgar E. Robinson of Carleton College has been elected assistant professor of history at Stanford University.

GENERAL

Accounts of the proceedings of the Seventeenth International Congress of Americanists, held in two sessions, at Buenos Aires in May and at the City of Mexico in September, 1910, were published in the American Anthropologist for October-December. The eighteenth congress will be held in London in September, 1912.