SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Under this heading toe notice such Books of the week as have not been reserred for review in other forms.] : her Life and Empire. By the Marquis of Lorne (now Duke of Argyll). (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 12s. 6d. net.)—This handsome volume has a place of its own among the books in which the story of Queen Victoria's public and private life has been told. There never was a Royal life for which such ample materials of biography existed, never one of which there was more to tell and less to conceal. To these materials Lord Lorne —to use the title which he had while the book was in course of serial publication—has had full access. The result is that for some, especially the earlier, parts of the Queen's life V.E.I. is a record of a special character, as regards both text and illus- trations. It is not easy to say whether any one incident has or has not been a pen or pencil subject in other biographies, but we feel sure that we have not seen elsewhere so complete a collection. For instance, all the movements and temporary sojourns of the Princess in early days are chronicled; in later time we have the Queen's impression about persons and events in a very attractive abundance. Some of these are curiously inter- esting when viewed in the light of later events, the visits of Louis Philippe, for instance—he came very shortly after the Tahiti incident—and Nicholas I. of Russia, who came to this country in 1816. Still later on, there is naturally less that is distinctive. The last forty years of the Queen's life and reign occupy little more than a hundred pages out of a total of three hundred and ninety-five ; chap. 1, on the other hand, telling the story from her birth to her acces- sion, runs to sixty-five. The pen and pencil pictures in his chapter will be particularly interesting to the elders of to- day, whose early memories they will often refresh. One paragraph —"Part of the summer of [1829] was spent at Broadstairs, where the old inhabitants used to tell with what evident delight the little girl played about on the sands "—tempts the writer of this notice to become autobiographical for a moment. He had the good fortune to be born in the January of this year, and as a six- months old baby was kissed—so the family tradition rune—by the Princess,
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