19 SEPTEMBER 1925, Page 24

ROBERT HARLEY, EARL OF OXFORD. By 0. B. Miller. (Blackwell.

3s. 6d.) IN this essay, which was awarded the Stanhope Essay Prize at Oxford this year, Mr. Miller makes a useful and well- documented contribution to the study of a somewhat baffling personality. Harley, says Mr. Miller, -" strove to reconcile the constitutional advance of the seventeenth century with the maintenance of royalty in substance as well as form,"-but concludes that he is " hardly in the second rank of great statesmen."