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To say that Mr Gardiner's Life is worthy of its subject is saying much, but not too much. These vast monumental biographies to the Victorian dead have been frequently done in the spirit and manner of mortuary sculpture, heroic size. Mr Gardiner is understood to envisage his task under the more humble figure of the embalmer. We can be sure that Sir William Harcourt under Mr Gardiner's hands is "very like." Mr Gardiner is of the modern school of biography, and his realistic method finds an appropriate subject in Sir William Harcourt. Nothing could be farther from the conventional steel engraving of the statesman than Mr Gardiner's succession of photographs. He has constantly caught Harcourt as he always was—humanly natural in his temper, his appetite, his affection, his humour. It goes without saying that a biography which does justice to this last aspect of Sir William's character cannot be a dry book. A reviewer might satisfy his readers merely by quoting the unexpected twists of Harcourt's mind and the happy turns of his phrase. One of Harcourt's unpleasant duties as Home Secretary was to act as jailer for devoted clergymen under sentence for ritualism, and devoted Irishmen imprisoned for patriotism. It was a bad situation, but Harcourt, seeking to find an excuse for releasing them on the ground of ill-health, wrote an excruciatingly funny letter to Gladstone, lamenting that they would grow so fat. In a speech on Lord Salisbury's foreign policy he played a delightful variation on Bismarck's description of that statesman as a man of lath painted to look like iron. "It is all very well," said Harcourt, "to come in like a lion; but if you have to go out like a lamb it is better not to come in like a lion. You will ultimately get more credit in your capacity as a lamb if you have not begun the operation by roaring and lashing your tail."

Robert Morss Lovett