Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
The Right Honorable
William E. Gladstone
A Study from Life
By Henry W. Lucy.
12mo. Cloth. Portrait. Price, $1.25.
The obvious difficulty of writing within the limits of this volume a sketch of the career of Mr. Gladstone is the superabundance of material. The task is akin to that of a builder having had placed at his disposal materials for a palace, with instructions to erect a cottage residence, leaving out nothing essential to the larger plan. I have been content, keeping this condition in mind, rapidly to sketch, in chronological order, the main course of a phenomenally busy life, enriching the narrative wherever possible with autobiographical scraps to be found in the library of Mr. Gladstone's public speeches, supplementing it by personal notes made over a period of twenty years, during which I have had unusual opportunities of studying the subject. Author's Preface.
Mr. Lucy begins with the boyhood and early home-life of his subject, and in a series of twenty-six graphic chapters, some of the titles of which are "Member for Newark," "Chancellor of the Exchequer," "Premier," "Pamphleteer," "The Bradlaugh Blight," "Egypt," "The Kilmainham Treaty," "The Stop-Gap Government," "Home Rule," "In the House and Out," Mr. Lucy has drawn, we believe, the most accurate portrait of one of the greatest men of the century yet drawn, and has told most graphically, tersely, and at the same time comprehensively, the story of a great career not yet finished. We have nowhere seen a better description of Mr. Gladstone's methods, of his strength and weakness as a debater, than Mr. Lucy gives us.—Boston Advertiser.
Mr. Lucy entitles his new book on Gladstone "A Study from Life." It is more than this, for the book covers rapidly his whole life, from birth to the present time, describing with tolerable clearness the great events of which he has been a part. For an outline biography, the reader will find this narrative satisfactory and readable. But the greatest interest attaches to those incidents in Gladstone's life of which the writer has been an eye-witness. He describes with great vivacity the parliamentary function known as "drawing old Gladstone out."—Advance.
Roberts Brothers, Boston, have just published an interesting book by Henry W. Lucy, entitled "Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone: A Study from Life." Though not necessarily so intended, this history of Gladstone is virtually the history of his country during the period of his ascendancy at least, and the book is valuable from that standpoint, because it is evidently fairly conceived and executed. The sketch of Mr. Gladstone is that of an admirer, but that will not tell against it with the world at large, which is alone an admirer of the "Grand Old Man." Beginning with this boyhood, it pictures him with friendly but faithful hand to the end of his career as head of the English Government, in language which gives an additional charm to the book, tracing his course from the day he became Member of Parliament till he was the acknowledged champion of Home Rule, and showing how, as his mind developed with experience, it cast off original errors growing larger day by day.—Brooklyn Citizen.
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