pended in trying,
often with success, to frustrate every single practical reform which
she suggested. To the objection that Mr. Strachey has depicted the
heroine as "an ill-tempered, importunate spinster, who drove a statesman
to his death," he might conceivably reply that if history, grown calm
with the passage of years, does so reveal her, it is rather absurd to go
on idealising her. Why not study the real Eagle in place of the fabulous
Swan? It is difficult to condemn Mr. Strachey along this line of
argument.

The early Victorians liked what was definable and tangible; they were
"ponderous mechanists of style." Even in their suggestions of change
they preserved an impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress,
a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition upon
character. Their preoccupation with moral ideas tinged the whole of
their surroundings, their literature, their art, their outlook upon
life. That the works of Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny,
should have been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intense
epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect how careful
Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never to tamper with "the deep
sense of moral evil." This apprehension of the rising immorality of the
world, against which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough
English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened" was dominant in no
spirit more than in that of Mr. Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey
gives a somewhat deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we have
passed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of the atmosphere
in which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed. We are not sure that Mr.
Strachey acted very wisely in selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his four
subjects, since the great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all.
When he entered the Church George III. was on the throne; his
accomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV.; he died when the
Victorian Age was just beginning. He was a forerunner, but hardly a
contemporary.

Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster Mr. Strachey
shows more approbation than usual, this portrait has not given universal
satisfaction. It has rather surprisingly called forth an indignant
protest from Dr. Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of
the human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward "perstringes"
the biographer brings us round to that biographer