scene,
and all his enmity to the period comes out in the closing pages, in
which he describes how the fierce philanthropist lived so long that the
Victorian Age had its revenge upon her, and reduced her, a smiling, fat
old woman, to "compliance and complacency." It is a picture which will
give much offence, but it is certainly extremely striking, and Mr.
Strachey can hardly be accused of having done more than deepen the
shadows which previous biographers had almost entirely omitted.

In this study, if the author is unusually indulgent to his subject, he
is relatively severer than usual to the surrounding figures. To some of
them, notably to Arthur Hugh Clough, he seems to be intolerably unjust.
On the other hand, to most of those public men who resisted the work of
Florence Nightingale it is difficult to show mercy. Mr. Strachey is so
contemptuous, almost so vindictive, in his attitude to Lord Panmure,
that the reader is tempted to take up the cudgels in defence of an
official so rudely flouted. But, on reflection, what is there that can
be said in palliation of Lord Panmure? He was the son of a man of whom
his own biographer has admitted that "he preserved late into the
[nineteenth] century the habits and passions--scandalous and
unconcealed--which had, except in his case, passed away. He was devoted
to his friends so long as they remained complaisant, and violent and
implacable to all who thwarted him.--His uncontrollable temper alienated
him from nearly all his family in his latter years. In private life he
was an immovable despot."

This was the father of Fox Maule, second Baron Panmure, of whom Mr.
Strachey has so much to say. Evidently he was a Regency type, as the son
was a Victorian. Determined not to resemble his father, Fox Maule early
became a settled and industrious M.P., and in 1846 Lord John Russell
made him Secretary of War. He held the same post under Lord Palmerston
from 1855 to 1858. Nothing could dislodge him from office; not even the
famous despatch "Take care of Dawb" could stir him. In 1860 he became
eleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years later, having enjoyed
every distinction, even that of President of the Royal Military Asylum.
He was "unco guid," as pious as his father had been profane, but he had
no social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which can at
this distance of time be discerned. Florence Nightingale called him the
Bison, and his life's energy seems to have been ex