Elizabethan
SEVERAL short biographies of Raleigh have come out in the last few years. The only justi- fication for the latest of them—Walter Raleigh by Philip Magnus (Collins, 8s. 6d.)—is that it happens to be the best. Philip Magnus is at times a little cavalier with detail; but he is most illuminating on character, admirably conveying the ruthlessness, cruelty, arrogance, ,Zarice and unscrupulousness with which aleigh climbed fame's ladder. Equally admirable is the skill with which the nobility °_f Raleigh's last years, when he had fallen off the ladder, is fused by the author into the earlier personality. Sentence of death concen- trated Raleigh's mind wonderfully; and in the fifteen years that were left to him he put that concentration to excellent purpose.
H. I.
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