meticulously accurate over details: listen to his last poem : They have put my bed beside the unpainted screen; With rapid pencil I answer the poems of friends; I have, I think, quoted enough to prove that Chinese poetry cannot be neglected by any lovers of the simple, the true, the clear-cut elementary principles of life. These poets are all essentially modern in their outlook in spite of the fact that many of them lived thousands of years ago, and that all of them belong to a civilization as remote from ours as it is possible to imagine. But love, friendship, solitude, and grief are not of any one time; their expression is of eternal interest, and it is because these Chinese poets elected to write of the things that lie always nearest to the human heart that they are never likely to lose their charm. Mr Waley has made England permanently his debtor for introducing them to us in our own language. I EMINENT VICTORIANS YTTON STRACHEY, the author of Eminent L Strachey, the editor of The Spectator: he is as much like him as liqueur brandy is like tea, as the reader will discover from the short foreword with which he prefaces his first essay in biography. ... "The history of the Victorian Age," he begins, "will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. In the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand. . . The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England: we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead-who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? What I have aimed at in this book is to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a master-- Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.' There is a bite" about these remarks which prepares us for a very definite ulterior intention: whatever else Mr Strachey does not do he certainly means to lacerate an age on which, one would have thought, enough scorn had been heaped since the nineties. Bitterly ironical, he portrays the lives of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon from a most peculiar and highly individual angle for his own very definite purposes. It is as an amusing example of what perverted cleverness can do that I would recommend this book. In the initial essay (which is also the longest) on Manning I was not at first interested: it is said to be the best. For the late R. H. Benson and the living R. A. Knox it would provide very great attraction, but most of us are not deeply concerned in the struggles which take place in the minds of men who begin life as members of the Established Church and ultimately veer round to Rome. It is like reading of sportsmen who played "Soccer" at school, and later found Rugger the better game. So long as a man is enthusiastically a lover of games, or is possessed of a deeply religious sense, that is all that the majority of us worry our heads about. Sectarianism or partisanship of this sort seems a rather stupid splitting of hairs, and long arguments about it "much ado about nothing." 66 On the other hand, it is entertaining to read of young men who are impelled with the sort of ardour which drives normal youths to haunt music-halls and fall in love with actresses to form a romantic |