Shaftesbury's house many years as his physician and friend, meditated a biography, but only collected a few materials for it. The fourth Earl, the son of the author of the 'Characteristics,' placed all the materials he possessed in the hands of a Mr. Benjamin Martin, for the purpose of a biography, which he began in 1734, but he was unfitted for the task, and the result was unsatisfactory. The MS., in 1766, was put, for improvement, into the hands of Dr. Sharpe, Master of the Temple; then into those of Dr. Kippis, editor of the 'Biographia Britannica,' after which it was printed, but the fifth Earl was so dissatisfied with it that the whole impression was destroyed, with the exception of two copies. Mr. Bentley republished it in 1836, edited--incompetently, Mr. Christie says--by Mr. George Wingrove Cooke. Stringer, Shaftesbury's solicitor, seems to have furnished Locke with information, fragments of which, in MS., in Locke's handwriting, are among the Shaftesbury papers at St. Giles's; but Stringer is inaccurate and confused. With these materials, and, of course, access to all the family papers, Mr. Christie has constructed his history--or, rather, his vindication--for his book has, throughout, the character of a polemic. It would have been more interesting, and more generally valuable, had Mr. Christie written an affirmative history relegating to appendices or footnotes the polemical discussions which different points demanded. As it is, he has furnished material and sifted it, for the use of the historian proper, and he has done this with rare acuteness and scrupulous fairness. The entire history of the Great Revolution, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, passes under review before us, and it could not be examined by a more competent critic.