Sylvester Douglas, first and only Lord Glenbervie in the peerage
of Ireland, was born in 1744. A member of the Privy Council, and for a short time Chief Secretary for Ireland, he held high appointments under Government was a Lord of the Treasury and Vice-President of the Board of Trade. Without ever making any great mark anywhere he knew all the celebrated people of his time, some intimately, and all by sight and reputation-bad reputation as often as not, for he was insatiable for scandal. After he was fifty he began to keep a diary, some portion , of which was published in 1910. A great deal more has lately been discovered, and is now given to the public edited, and, we understand, con- siderably curtailed, by Mr. Francis Bickley, under the title of Diaries of Sylvester Douglas (Constable, 42s.). The Diary is very franls, and yet somehow it is not very human. His opportunities for the writing of social history were very great, but his aptitude for doing so was small. The reader, after a few chapters, experiences the satiety which books of anec- &nes, however well informed and however little discreet, almost invariably create.
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