mentaire. But, le malin, does he not make them speak for themselves? For the facts are selected with an ingenuity which we sometimes fear to be disingenuous, and a Latin fondness for oratio obliqua only makes his satire more devastating. Lack of principles may amount in itself to a principle; and Mr Strachey, with all his greater subtlety, is perhaps at heart as much a partisan as Gibbon or Voltaire. In vain does he write of men as if they were animals, and he a naturalist; though detached, he is still not impartial. For obviously some sorts of animals are more attractive and comprehensible to him than others.
The third characteristic of this historian is that he has the expert eye of a theatrical producer for dramatic effect. He makes costume eloquent; he makes every situation tell; and if in Eminent Victorians he is writing too evidently for the sake of "effects," in Queen Victoria he sets his scene and arranges his lighting with subtler and more art-concealing art. Indeed it sometimes seems that while Clio serves to grace his measure, Thalia is his real flame. For he stages the drama of history as a comedy of manners; his particular delight is in the unexpected and the preposterous; and his sentimental passages are flavoured with a delicate cynicism which makes them the most enchanting things in his work. He remains detached, and so succeeds in writing history that is dramatic without being romantic. Does not such detachment constitute the difference between classic and romantic art?
A favourite method of Mr Strachey's is to sketch a man's appearance and deduce from it his character. When reading him, we naturally tend to reverse the process. The phantasm of the author thus evoked from the pages of his biographical studies is a figure half Creevey, half Voltaire; a disillusioned happy little man, with small penetrating eyes, very neat, very urbane, clean-shaven, of course, and probably plumpish. And he seems, in these books, to gaze with attentive curiosity through the bars of the Menagerie of History at the pompous antics of all these ridiculous Victorian creatures, wagging their vast vaticinatory beards, and taking the Union Jack, the Deity, and themselves with fantastic and equal seriousness.
But now Mr Strachey turns his attention to a more polite zoological department; and leads us to the Monkey House of the Eighteenth Century to observe the inhabitants as they gregariously chatter and quarrel round the cleverest of apes, Voltaire, and tease into madness the lonely, pathetic, farouche, incomprehensible bear, Jean-
