Men of the Time. Seventh Edition. (Routledge.)—The present issue of
Men of the Time is somewhat more complete than its immediate predecessors, while it has entirely lost that vice of puffery and partizan- ship for which the first volumes were conspicuous. The facts of each man's life are given shortly without any expression of opinion, and as a great many men are chronicled in this way, and new names are added each time, a highly useful book is always growing in usefulness. Of course, it is not perfect. Some of its dates seem to us obviously wrong. It is surely impossible, for instance, that Mr. Swinburne can have been born in 1843. It is clear that the Frankfort Parliament did not sit in 1851. Whether or no Mr. Butler accepted the Bishopric of Pieter- maritzburg in 1867, it is certain that he no longer answers to that title. Sir J. B. Kerslake did not practise with success in the Equity Courts for the reason that he went the Western Circuit. We do not see why the German philosopher Erdman should be represented as having written a series of works with French titles. But none of these mis- takes are equal to the crowning blunder of the present edition, copied, we believe, from its equally guilty ancestors. It includes Gartner among living celebrities, forgetting that he died just twenty-one years ago.
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