Shorter Notices
Wilberforce. By Reginald Cour land. (Collins. 12s. 6d.) ALL the praise which this admirable biography deserves was bestowed on it when it first appeared twenty-two years ago. The reprint now made available is not a revised edition, for the good reason that no revision was necessary. Sir Reginald Coupland is probably the highest authority living on the crusade for the suppression first of the slave trade and then of the institution of slavery in British possessions, but the great merit of the present volume is that it dispels effectively ihe idea of Wilberforce as a man of a single interest and a single purpose, noble though that purpose was. The intimacy of his relations with Pitt extended over the whole political field, and the story of Wilberforce could not be told—not, at any rate, by so competent a narrator as Professor Coupland—without casting new and instructive light on the great War Minister who had desired so ardently to gain fame as a great peace Minister. This is biography as biography should be
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