Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville. By J. A. Lovat-Fraser. (Cam- bridge
University Press. 3s. (id. net.)—The shrewd Scottish lawyer who was for long the friend and chief colleague of the younger Pitt, who ruled Scotland and India, managed the Great War for some years, and was First Lord of the Admiralty till six months before Trafalgar, is an excellent subject for the biographer, and Mr. Lovat-Fraser's little book is, so far as it goes, very readable. He makes clear, at any rate, the entraordinary influence which Dundas possessed north of the Tweed, where the gentry and the provosts and baffles, the Church and the Universities, were almost all in his pocket. He exercised the Crown patronage and found posts in India for innumerable needy younger sons, so that he was a man to be courted. The author shows that Melville's impeachment was really a piece of party spite. Whit- bread made himself ridicalous and the Lords acquitted Melville on all counts, although his subordinate had erred. Mr. Lorat-Fraser resents Mr. Fortescue's denunciations of Dundas as one of the worst War Ministers we have ever had, but he attempts no definite reply to the charge, presumably because it cannot be disproved. Dundas believed in scattering small bodies of troops over the whole theatre of war—a policy which cost us dearly in blood and treasure, especially in the West Indies. In this respect, and in others, he was Pitt's evil genius.
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