Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/327

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1920 SHORT NOTICES , 319 portion of his subject. His introduction is wide in scope and generally- precise in its information. The occasional slips are very few and trivial. Lettice Knowles was not Lady Leicester in 1566 but after 1578, and ' Protestants ' in 1541 were not returned to parliament but burnt at the stake. ' Baron ' as a title of nobility comes into these pages earlier than it does in authentic history, though the fault is a venial one to the historian of the county which had in the ' barons of Stafford ' an early real case of baron used as a grade of rank. But the numerous biographies are carefully done and very illuminative. Practically every knight of the shire has his allotted niche ; only some borough members elude the researches of the author and his collaborators. Incidentally the book throws light on problems that extend far beyond Staffordshire, as for instance the slow disappearance of the social gulf between the burgess and the knight of the shire and the possible effects produced by the willingness of the gentry to sit as borough members on the nature of the borough constituencies. The claims of the steward of the duchy of Lancaster to return one member for certain boroughs within duchy influence raises some interesting points, and some of Mr. Beaven's and Mr. Pink's notes are decidedly valuable. There is a good index, and an improved reproduction of E. Bowen's county map of 1747. T. F. T. Under the title of Slavic Europe, a Selected Bibliography in the Western European Languages (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1918), Dr. R. J. Kerner, of the university of Missouri, has compiled a serviceable catalogue dealing with the Slavs in general, and the Russians, Poles, the other Slavs in the German empire, the Czecho-Slovaks, and the southern Slavs, including the Bulgarians ; but it contains no works in Slavonic languages, except a certain number of transliterated titles, mostly of bibliographical treatises, and, save in a few cases, mentions no books published after 1914. It does not always give the latest and best editions ; e.g. Nikephoros Patriarches, a valuable authority for early Bulgarian history, has long been published in the Teubner series, so that the Bonn edition has been superseded. There are also now a seventh edition of Driault's history of the eastern question and new editions of Gladstone's pamphlet on Montenegro and JakSid's book on modern Serbian history, while Professor Pavle Popovid's handbook on the history of Jugoslav literature has been omitted. ' Chindina ' (no. 165) should be ' Chiudina ', and is the same as the author of the book on Montenegrin history cited further on (no. 4229. 2). The bibliography is well arranged and clearly printed. W. M. Mr. William Foster, CLE., Registrar and Superintendent of Records, has given us in his Guide to the India Office Records, 1600-1858 (London : India Office, 1919), a well-arranged and most useful handbook to the immense mass of India Office records. Burke once said of the East India Company that they obliged their servants ' to a minuteness and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public ministers - . . the Company's government is a government of writing — a government