VICTORIANS
Men Were Different. By Shane Leslie. (Michael Joseph. 12S. 6d.) Two statesmen. are included in Mr. Shane Leslie's studies in Victorian 'biography, Randolph Churchill . and George Wyndham. A third study describes Wilfred Blunt, a thwarter of statesmen, who however has a greater claim to immortality .as a poet than as an Irish and Egyptian agitator. The thread that connects Lord Randolph, Wyndham and Blunt in the mind of a writer such as Mr. Leslie, who grew up at the close of the last century and is still an unashamed lover of the Victorian picturesque, is easy to discern. All three, though in varying degrees its critics, could only have arisen in a society which was able to suppress what bored it, to ignore or to despise all that happened outside Of itself. All three,' in Mr. Leslie's own words, were vivid unclassifiable characters. His other two monographs are of Augustus Hare and Arthur Dunn, who by contrast served the Victorian idea with fkith. Hare and Dunn lived outside the high roads of fame ; but to both the VictOrians conceded their gratitude, to Hare because his guide books provided a cheap -substitute-for the Grand Tour, to Dunn because he founded one of the new types of preparatory school in which boys were neither cowed nor soured.
Each of Mr. Leslie's portraits is skilfully done, and the book as a whole is a valuable piece of historical evidence. Speaking of the work of Dunn, his own preparatory schoolmaster, Mr. Leslie is reminded that before him even "boys of position" were ill-treated at their "preps," a fact regrettable in itself but which perhaps shows that snobbism was more rampant when Victoria's reign ended than when it began. Mr. Leslie was himself a boy of position at Ludgrove, and Randolph Churchill was his godfather. His familiarity, amply illustrated in many epigrammatic sentences and amusing stories, with high Victorian society is therefore not merely the result of omnivorous reading in Victorian biography. All his. characters were well-born. He writes of them with affection and amusement, he shows them, as it were, as they eat and drink, in their relations with friends and acquaintances,.and does not overestimate their achieve- ments, except perhaps in the case of George Wyndham's Irish policy and his literary style.
A small slip attracted my notice : the attribution to a Dublin professor of philosophy of the saying that "Time is the moving shadow of eternity." The professor in question is a master of impressive speech, but on the occasion he was quoting from
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