THE LOST HISTORIAN : A MEMOIR OF SIR SIDNEY LOW
Cuironf Literafufe'
By Major Desmond Chapman-Huston
Good judges among this contemporaries would have given Sidney Low a place among the half-dozen ablest journalists of the last generation. The son of a Hungarian Jew (a refugee of 1848) he was one of a large and gifted family, went to Balliol in 1877, and nine years later succeeded Frederick Greenwood as editor of the St. James's Gazette.- He was exactly suited to the direction of a-small evening organ which gave little atten:. tion to news. .No second editorship felt to him, although he might have had the. Morning Post had he been willing to accept 'Lord- Glenesk's terms. His most important work in journalism was done as leader-writer and special correspon- dent of the Standard, and when that famous morning journal was killed, Low felt the onrush of the new Fleet Street as fatal to himself. His dominant passion was the Empire, he worshipped Milner, and was deeply convinced that an tinder- 'standing between Britain and Germany ought to' ave been achieved. He had wide interests, was immensely informed, and had an extraordinary circle of friends and acquaintances. There cannot have been a publicist in England in the period between the Victorian jubilee and the Great War to whom more doors were open. No doubt it is true that Sidney Low deplored the fact that he was compelled to relinquish the writing of history and was best known by The Governance of England, but this is an inadequate reason for his biographer's proclaiming him a failure, which emphatically he was not. The few letters printed in this book (Murray, 12s. 6d.) are rather jejune, as are the specimen jottings from Sidney Low's diary, while the extracts from old reviews are dead matter. But almost everything else quoted in the book makes a shining contrast to Major Chapman-Huston's own padding, whether narrative or comment. Not many readers,-for. instance, can be interested in the Major's opinion, repeated more than once, that Milner won the War. Sidney Low, anion of fine charaCter and accomplishment, deserved an intelligent, memoir,
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