Miss JEAN BURTQN'S biography is well-named, for Isabel Arundel: declared
that if she were a man, she would be Richard Burton,
" but being only a woman, I would be Richard Burton's wife," and the book lives up to its title, for it does succeed in painting an ade- quate picture of a famous man's wife, although the author hardly gets under her skin as Catholic, traveller, spiritualist, author, animal- loves, editor of erotica. Perhaps it is too much to expect, as it would be too much to expect that often in nature a man of Richard Burton's type should find the perfect mate. He had the meteoric personality of a Trelawny or a Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, in which there is something more than only " sound and fury," but al something lacking—the strong, directing, integrating power tha makes the really great man, whether in adventure or any oche field: Burton was not a Livingstone or a Stamford Raffles. As character, Isabel was more integrated, by the fact of the love sh concentrated on her husband ; some readers might have found th book more satisfying if it had dwelt on that psychological sid rather than on the historical. It is a problem that evcry biographe has to decide, whether to offer her facts as raw material (quotation from letters, contemporary impressions, &c.), or to serve them u pre-digested. But as a story of its heroine's marriage, this bi graphy never has a dull moment.
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