Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/158

150 SHORT NOTICES January when he really means the reverse, for the queen says ' it grates my soul to take a man into my service that has not only betrayed me, but tricked me several times '. There are other indications that the book has been somewhat hastily written and insufficiently revised. There are also more mistakes than there should be in the bibliographical notes which form the appendix. C. H. F. Dr. L. H. Gipson's Jared Ingersoll, a Study of American Loyalism in relation to British Colonial Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920) is an excellent example of the new manner of approaching the problems of American colonial history. What American thirty years ago could have written as follows ? Nevertheless, casting aside inherited prejudices and the political opportunism of the older historians, both British and American, who demanded a scapegoat in order to interpret the history of this period, it is not clear how the Grenville program can be regarded other than a sincere and not unenlightened attempt to accomplish something of vast importance to the nation, which would have gone far towards making the British people, scattered as they were in 1765, ready to face any emergency . . . a premature step, taken in good faith, in the direction of realizing a federal system for the British Empire. With regard to the comparative burden of taxation in England and the American colonies, it is interesting to note that in Connecticut no colony taxes appear to have been collected between the years 1766 and 1770. The authenticity of Barre's speech in the house of commons on the Stamp Act has been sometimes questioned ; but it was heard by Ingersoll, who sent notes of it at once to America. Jared Ingersoll was an undoubted place-hunter, a convinced loyalist, and a stamp distributor under the hated act ; and yet he succeeded in retaining the respect and affection of many who differed from him in politics ; and in 1777 he was living in a Philadelphian boarding-house on the best of terms with the redoubtable Samuel Adams. ' At the parting of the ways ', we are told, ' he sought the impossible to go in both directions. A lonely and repudiated cham- pion of the old order of things which was passing away before his eyes never to return, he yet sought to adjust himself to the new conditions ', by offering advice with regard to the solution of the financial problem before the Continental Congress. He died in August 1781, some two months before the surrender of Yorktown, his funeral being attended ' by the gentlemen of the town and a very large assembly '. It only remains to add that Dr. Gipson's book is based on a most careful investiga- tion of the authorities, in manuscript or printed, bearing on his subject. H. E. E. The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (Manchester : University Press, 1920), which Dr. H. McLachlan has edited, make an interesting book on an episode of considerable importance. The Cambridge movement towards unitarianism, as it may fairly be called though one of the seceders was a student of Christ Church, had a close resemblance to the course, of the Oxford movement. Both were academic, and the earlier had even more support than the latter in its university. The master and all the resident fellows of Jesus joined in the petition to par-