Professor Masson has not convinced us of the excellence of his method by his formal defence of it, in which he urges, first, his deliberate purpose, and next his disregard of preconceived ideas of literary form. The former simply affirms that his book has not drifted by accident into its present shape; in the latter every writer is to be judged solely by success. There is, moreover, a strong presumption in favour of a 'combination of a biography with a contemporary history.' Every biography is a necessary part of contemporary history, and the question is simply one of degree. Whether a method such as Professor Masson's is justified, depends solely upon the degree in which the hero of the biography contributes to the history with which his name is associated, and in which he can say, _quorum pars magna fuit_. Concerning Cromwell, for instance, there could scarcely be a doubt as to its propriety. Mr. Christie is justified in adopting the same method in his biography of the first Earl of Shaftesbury; both were men whose lives entered greatly into the history of their time, not only in the sense of being identified with it, in all that made them notable, but in the sense of moulding and constituting it; so that without them--the former especially--the history itself would have been very different. Milton scarcely played such a part in the history of the Commonwealth; although the most illustrious man in it, the sphere of his especial greatness was not of it. It is difficult to suppose that the course and character of the Commonwealth would in any important particular have been essentially different had he not existed. As Cromwell's secretary, and still more as a vigorous pamphleteer, he doubtless contributed powerfully to the idea and defence of the Commonwealth, especially of its ecclesiastical polity; but only as Dryden and Swift contributed to the polity of their day. In the period which this volume comprises--1638-1643--we are almost ludicrously impressed with the insignificant relations of Milton to the events that it narrates. In the huge sandwich which the volume constitutes, the biographical chapters are not even the thinnest slices of meat, they are at the most the mustard. Professor Masson has not been able to avoid in history the solecism in geography of the renowned minister of the lesser Cumbrae. It is a study of the individual man in his relations to the universe. It is, therefore, neither a perfectly detailed history, nor an independent biography; while the biography is full and perfect, such portions of the history only are narrated as are supposed to relate to the life and thought of Milton, but of necessity this is an arbitrary and fluctuating quantity. There is a sense of disproportion and of artificiality throughout which disturbs our enjoyment of the scholarly and vigorous qualities of the book; for Professor Masson is justly entitled to take his place among the few genuine historians of the day. Every page