THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY.VOL. II.* TILE appearance of the

second volume of the Dictionary of National Biography, within three months from the publication of the first, augurs well for the prospect of the completion of the work within a reasonable period ; and we are at least relieved from the fear of the catastrophe—to which great alphabetical undertakings seem always liable—of a collapse with the termination of the letter A. Mazzuchelli indeed, in his biographical fragment on the writers of Italy, which as far as it goes has never been surpassed and rarely equalled, was fortunate enough with his sixth and last folio to reach the end of B ; and there is, indeed, hardly a letter in the early part of the alphabet which has not formed the termination of some fragment of a biographical dictionary. But these abrupt conclusions are perhaps less irritating than a work in form complete, but of which the merit, the fulness, and the accuracy become, as the work progresses, fine by degrees and beautifully less, as is the case with the Nouvelle Biographic Generale, and Bose's Biographical Dictionary. Of the forty-six volumes of the Biographic Generale, upwards of thirty-six are devoted to the letters A-M, leaving less than ten for N-Z ; and while the volumes devoted to the letter A contain nearly two thousand names omitted from the Biographic Universells, of one thousand names in the forty-fourth volume of the Biographic Universelle, more than seven hundred and sixty are omitted from the Biographic Generale. Rose's Biographical Dictionary is a still greater offender in this respect ; for, of the twelve volumes of which it consists, no less than six —exactly half of the work—are devoted to the letters A, B, and C. We shall not anticipate either of these catastrophes for the Dictionary of National Biography. Neither in fullness, in accuracy, nor in interest, does the second volume show any falling-off from its predecessor; and in one by no means unimportant point we are happy to observe a decided improvement.

* Dictionary of National Biography. Edi'ed by Leslie Stephen. Vol. IL London : Smith, Elder, and Co. 1%..5.

In reviewing the first volume, we had to notice the inordinate length of some of the articles devoted to personages of second or third-rate importance, and the want of that due proportion which it is one of the chief duties of the editor to maintain.

The new volume is not open to this censure ; for, though there are some articles which surprise us by their length and others by their brevity, yet, on the whole, due proportion is quite as fairly observed as we have any right to expect.

Only two names of the first importance, Anselm and Bacon, and perhaps three of the second—Ascham, Atterbury, and Roger Bacon—are to be found in the new volume. In so exceptional a case as that of Bacon, no one can complain that thirty pages (the same amount of space that, in the first volume, was given to Queen Anne) are devoted to his life and works. Neither in the life by Professor Gardiner, nor in the account of the works by Professor Fowler, do we find, or expect to find, anything new. Their views respectively on Bacon's life and philosophy are before the world in other works. But their articles are among the ablest and most satisfactory of those contained in the volume. Every historical student knows what are Professor Gardiner's views on the subject; and though we think he passes too lightly over Bacon's share in the trial of Essex, yet as to the charges of bribery and corruption, and general subser vience to the Crown, on which -the great Chancellor has been so severely judged, we think Dr. Gardiner's more lenient view is also the true one, and that in the last sentence of his article he gives a reasonable explanation of Bacon's inconsistencies and shortcomings :

" Bacon was too great a man to play othqg than a second-rate part in the age in which he lived, and he struggled hard, to the detriment of his own character as well as of his fame, to avoid the inevitable consequence."

Canon Stephens has given us a full and accurate narrative of the facts of Anselm's life, and an excellent notice of the authorities; and though we think that the article might with advantage have been condensed, it would be unreasonable to say that twenty pages is necessarily too much to be taken-up by the greatest man who has ever sat upon the throne of Canterbury, the profoundest and most original writer that had appeared in the Latin Church since St. Augustine.

The articles by the editor continue to be everything that we could wish; and we heartily hope that in succeeding volumes he will retain, as his own share, all our leading men of letters of

the eighteenth century. Dr. Garnett gives us, as we should expect, sympathetic and admirable notices of Aubrey and Ash mole; though we think he is too favourable to the grasping, selfish old antiquary, of whose heartless spoliation of Mrs. Tradescant, and the no less heartless entry in his Diary, when she was found dead in her pond, we can never think without indignation. There is no contributor whose initials meet us oftener than those of Mr. S. L. Lee, or whose articles are more uniformly satisfactory, although they would, in some instances,

have been the better for the application of the editorial pruningknife ; yet they leave nothing to be desired in point of fulness of detail, of accuracy in bibliographical information, or in refer ences to authorities. He and Mr. A. H. Bullen (whose articles also deserve great praise) are almost the only contributors who seem to have invariably consulted the catalogue of the British Museum, the neglect of which has led, in some cases to inaccuracy, in others to important omissions. If Dr. Payne had referred to it, he would have known where to find a copy of the Medicines Ohymicce of Francis Anthony.

We are glad to see that one in every way so competent as Mr. Knight has succeeded the late Dutton Cook in writing the lives of actors and dramatists ; for we are sure that he will bear in mind—as, indeed, ho has done already—what his predecessor seems entirely to have forgotten, that, though a man is an actor or a dramatist, there may also be something else about him worth mentioning. The life of that remarkable man, Philip Astley, is ludicrously inadequate. There is not a word to intimate that he wrote a single book, or had a single claim to

remembrance, except as the founder of Astley's Amphitheatre. But, in fact, his books, though no doubt worthless from a literary point of view, possess great merits, some of them as manuals of equestrian instruction, others as illustrating the campaigns in which the author served, and the condition of our

Army at that time. Nor does the Margravine of Amapa& fare much better. She was not merely a writer of fifth-rate plays ; her Memoirs, published in 1826, when she was seventysix years old, astonished and delighted the world, and are perhaps the best example which we have in English, of Mimoires,

in the French acceptation of the word. Yet this work is only mentioned among the authorities for the life of the Margravine, without any intimation, that she was herself the author of it.

The editor has written that the English lives in the fragment of the Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge were the best models of a desirable mode of treatment, and this, we should have thought, would be sufficient to suggest to his contributors the importance of referring to these articles. We have made nothing like an exhaustive comparison of the two books; but certainly the lives of Arthur Annesley, the Margravine of Anspach, and Philip Astley, in the fragment, are in every point of view superior to those in the new work, and the writers have clearly never referred to the Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. On the other hand, although several writers in the new Dictionary have been careful to acknowledge their obligations to that of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, we are sorry to have noticed articles, among others those on Major-General John Armstrong and James Arthur, which are simply abridged from, and in the very words of, the Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, though without any reference to that work, the authorities even being appropriated as though they were the independent sources of information used by the writers. The general article on the Arundels of Cornwall introduces a new feature, and one which, if kept strictly within bounds, and as judiciously compressed as in this instance, will prove a valuable addition to the Dictionary ; but it must be very sparingly introduced, nor can it possibly be allowed to be a substitute for editorial supervision upon a matter of no trifling importance, and in which the new work has much to learn from the Biographie Universelle. Faulty as was the editing of that great work in many respects, the skill with which the lives of members of the same family were placed and held in relation to each other deserves great praise. But nothing of this is attempted in the Dictionary of National Biography, nor would it be possible for it to be done except by the active exer. cise of editorial supervision ; and the consequence is that the reader is repeatedly left in doubt (as in the case of the two William Athertons, and of Edward and Henry Bagshaw) whether persons of the same name are in any way related to each other. Wherever several members of a family are included, their relationship should invariably be accurately stated, and there should be a reference to the lives of the other members of the same family.

The article that has caused us the most amusement is that on H.R.H. the Princess Augusta Sophia, daughter of George III. As there is apparently not a single fact of the smallest interest discoverable about this illustrious lady, her biographer has filled a column with the following, which appear to be the most remarkable actions of the Princess's life. On June 1st, 1789, she was a partner to the Duke of York in a country dance ; in 1818, she gave £50 to the National Society for the Education of the Poor; in 1819, she played and sang before Madame D'Arblay. Why the editor has thought it necessary to insert a long notice of each of the children of George III., even the most insignificant, but to omit the daughters of George II., and the wife and daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, we cannot guess, especially as the latter had at least a history, and adventures more or less creditable, and their lives were not made-up of the trivialities forming that of the Princess Augusta Sophia. Notices of Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick, mother of Queen Caroline, Anne, Princess of Orange, and Augusta, Princess of Wales, mother of George III., might have been looked-for in the now Dictionary. But for the lives of those Royal or official personages whom it may be thought necessary to insert, but who really had no history, we heartily commend the admirable example of Mr. Lucas Mackay, whose life of William Baillie, Lord Polkemmet, tells us in five lines everything that any one can want to know about that learned judge

As to the omissions in this volume, we make no complaint; we only wonder what can have been the reasons for the selection of some names and the omission of others. To give a long list of those whom personally we should have been glad to see noticed, even at the expense of reducing the Princess Augusta and some others to the limits of Lord Polkemmet, would be merely to make a cheap display of pretended erudition. Any one who consults the pages of Lowudes, Watt, the British Museum Catalogue, or the Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, can make such a list for himself. There is, however, one name the absence of which can only be

accounted for by an oversight, the author of many books of almost unprecedented success, which have run through innumerable editions, and which are quoted daily in our courts of law— j. F. Archbold.

In one case we have certainly noticed the editor nodding. He cannot have looked over the article on a lately deceased Professor of Greek, or he would not have allowed three.quarters of a column to be taken-up with extracts from his testimonials when a candidate for a chair at Sydney. If we mention the shortcomings of the new volume, it is only in the hope that they may be remedied in those that follow, and that each succeeding volume may, like the present, show improvement over its predecessors. We heartily thank the editor and his contributors for this second instalment of a work the value and interest of which it is impossible to overrate, and which, we believe, will hereafter be considered as one of the most useful which the nineteenth century has produced.