ENGLISH LITERATURE 191 



F. H. Maitland's Posthumous Papers and Studies, has also produced a valuable mono- 

 graph on Democracy in Europe and a priceless little memoir of the great Napoleon. The 

 editor of the Historical Review, Dr. R. Lane Poole (b. 1857), has produced a work of 

 much erudition in his History of the Exchequer in the twelfth century. A solid crown 

 has been added to the series of somewhat unequal posthumous studies by Lord Acton 

 by the issue of the Lectures on the French Revolution. The Esprit frondeur : in contem- 

 porary history is well represented in Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's 1 uncompromising Secret 

 History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Two succes d'estime in historical biography 

 have been achieved by Lord Rosebery 2 and Mr. Holland Rose (b. 1855) in their respective 

 lives of Chatham and Pitt. For different reasons they seem unlikely to occupy a place 

 among the greatest of biographies, but both fill important gaps and are invaluable to 

 the historian. The life of Chatham is in the strict sense preliminary only; it closes with 

 the year 1756. Holland Rose's first volume exhibits Pitt as intendant, the second as 

 pilot. Mr. D. A. Winstanley has done a promising book on Chatham and the Whig 

 Opposition. A word of recognition is due to Miss Kate Norgate's work on The Minority 

 of Henry III, in which she continues the destructive criticism of the baronial party com- 

 menced in her book on John Lackland, and to the completion and continuation respec- 

 tively of Longmans' Political History (12 vols.) and Methuen's English History (5 vols. 

 completed out of 7). Scotland has suffered a heavy blow in the loss of her accomplished 

 historian, Andrew Lang. England has experienced a doubtful gain in the accession 

 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling to the ranks of her historians ( History of England, 1911, with 

 C. R. L. Fletcher). 



In biography proper some notable volumes have appeared, almost overwhelmed, it is 

 true, by the enormous multiplication of mechanically made Lives. The two volumes 

 of Mr. Monypenny's Life of Disraeli, Wilfrid Ward's Life of Newman, and Sir E. T. 

 Cook's Life of Ruskin, are destined, it must be supposed, to occupy positions on the 

 highest plane in a form of literature which many people regard as the most inter- 

 esting of all. Mr. Monypenny's first volume hardly obtained the credit due to it, but 

 the second shows that his selection as Disraeli's official biographer was entirely justified. 

 The qualities of concentration, brevity and self-effacement are rare in modern biography, 

 and the author's premature death in 1912 has left a difficult task to the writer who shall 

 complete his work. More even than the Life of Disraeli, the Life of Newman had been 

 discounted by anticipatory speculation. It is a noble and conscientious monument of 

 biographic piety, though it cannot be said that the Newman legend has gathered quite 

 so much brightness from it as in the corresponding case of the Life of Disraeli. Sir 

 E. T. Cook's Life of Ruskin is a splendidly able, judicious and enduring estimate of a 

 great Victorian, whose fame, like Gladstone's, is at present in a trough of depression, 

 consequent upon a range of contemporary activity and influence almost too varied to 

 be coherent. The only other cognate work which can claim to rival these in document- 

 ary value and standard quality is Mr. Aylmer Maude's Life of Tolstoi. 



Two biographies of great brilliance, which derive a unique interest from the tempera- 

 ment of their writers, are Mr. Hilaire Belloc's Marie Antoinette and Mr. Walter Sichel's 

 Sheridan. The first is an interpretation of the revolutionary, democratic and military 

 forces of 1789 concentrated upon the prismatic personality of Marie Antoinette; the 

 second a supreme of the social aspects of England iri the penultimate phase of aristocracy, 

 grafted upon a new valuation of the sentimental and Pierrot -like character of Richard 

 Brinsley Sheridan. The causticity and candour, which supply the differentiating quality 

 of the hardiest stock of autobiography, are well illustrated in Goldwin Smith's Reminis- 

 cences and Sir William Butler's Autobiography: well too, though more diffusely, in the 

 Reminiscences of H. M. Hyndman, and of Oscar Browning. A passing tribute should 

 further be paid to three interesting revelations of personality; the first strictly historical, 

 Mr. Snead Cox's Life of Cardinal Vaughan; the second partly imaginative, Miss Marie 

 Hay's Winter Queen (Elizabeth of Bohemia); the third largely autobiographical, Mrs. 

 Mills's Life of Frederic Shields, the 'artist (1833-1911), a " human document " of curious 



1 B. 1840; see E. B. iv, 93. 2 B. 1847; see E. B. xxiii, 731. 



