The Earl of Roubery, K.G. By Jane T. Stoddart (Hodder
and Stoughton. Os. net.) -It is useless to protest against the practice of writing biographies of the living. "The people love to have it so," and there is an end of it. We must be content if they are written with sufficient good taste. Anyhow, they will not improbably preserve facts and impressions that might other- wise be forgotten. And it is certainly true that when a man lives to extreme old age—prosit omen to the subject of the volume before us—the materials for a personal biography may become scanty. This is certainly a pleasant, readable, and tasteful book, and admirably illustrated. The portraits of Lord Rosebery number a score. Some day he will have to have a chamber in the National Portrait Gallery all to himself. It would be inconsistent for us to go into the details of the biography. But perhaps the youth of Lord Rosebery is suffi-
ciently remote for us to say that he was a very remarkable boy, —somebody says that he was the very wisest boy that he ever knew. Curiously enough, he seems to have been a student at Eton, and something like an idler at Oxford. But we are getting into dangerous ground. It must suffice to say that this is as creditable a hook of its kind as we have ever seen.
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