The Life of His Majesty William the Second, German Emperor.
By William Jacks, LL.D. (MaeLehose and Sons, Glasgow. Os. net.).— " Unfortunately—as I think—almost all the biographies published in Britain have an undercurrent of unfriendliness which in some cases leads the authors to pronounce harsh judgments and draw conclusions not quite in accord with the spirit in which we are advised to 'scan our brother man.' " Holding this view, Mr. Jacks, the author of this new biography, has gone almost to the opposite extreme, as he himself evidently suspects from what ho says about his hero's "electrical personality." No doubt the book is not without certain merits. It is an industrious compilation ; it gives very full details of the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty ; and as a treasury of the Kaiser's views upon religion, war, and the thousand other subjects he has delivered himself upon in the course of a public life which, though not as yet long, has been full of activity, it is of genuine historical value because it gives as nearly as possible these utterances in their author's own words. But undiscriminating hero-worship mars the tone of the volume,—a hero-worship which, when it comes down to the details of the Kaiser's private life, degenerates into the ludicrous. Surely, too, it is not in the best of taste for Mr. Jacks to include a photo- graph of himself among the illustrations of his book.
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