BIOGRAPHIES.
The Life of Sir Robert Moray. By Alexander Robertson.
(Longmans and Co. 12s. 6d. net.) ' Alexander Robertson, the young scholar and poet, will be remembered by a large circle of students from Oxford, Edin- burgh and Sheffield. His work as a scholar had no oppor- tumty of spreading to the outside world, but there must be many readers who will recall his booklets of War verses, Comrades and The Last Poems of Alexander Robertson. He was one of many, and a kind oblivion is hiding their work, leaving only the general fragrance, the Sidneyesque Legend. The Life of Sir Robert Moray, edited, With a memorial of its author, by Dr. H. W. Meikle, is Robertson's thesis for the degree of B.Litt., which he received in 1913. There is, unfortunately, little that can be said in its favour from the 'viewpoint of the general reader. As a compilation of several new facts, as a sidelight on the tremendous events in which Moray played a more distinguished part than his small fame ••vould suggest, the work will be useful to the student ; but even the student to-day has an unacademic hankering after flesh on the bones of his history. Robertson has not given the breath of life to his careful structure. Moray is a lay Ifigure. Richelieu, 1Vlazarin. the Charleses, even the Chiefs of the Gleneairn Rising, would be as dead, if we had not the Associations in our mind to give them life. Robertson had his opportunity of lifting a new man out of facts into history, but he could not or did not take it. At the end of the book Moray has no truer existence than is given him by the title-page statement of his life, "Soldier, Statesman and Man of Science, 1608-1673."
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