21 NOVEMBER 1896, Page 12

The Story of Florence Nightingale. By W. J. Wintle. (S.S.U.)

—It is needless to say that this is well worth reading. It is scarcely in the best taste to describe Miss Nightingale as " the Heroine of the Crimea." It is not, we may be sure, a description that she would herself approve of. But this is not of much im- portance. The story is well told, for the author begins at the beginning. It was from Theodore Fliodner, who founded the Deaconesses' Institution, that Miss Nightingale derived her first inspiration. But she had the root of the matter in her—witness the touching little story of her nursing the shepherd's deg. The tale of what she did in the Crimea cannot be told too often. Who that hears it can doubt, what Buckle denied, the force of a personality ?