Obituary notices of King Edward the Seventh have been plentiful enough. The two most important appreciations of him have been Sir Sidney Lee’s, in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” and the two essays in Lord Esher’s recently published book, entitled, “The Influence of King Edward.” It is hardly necessary to say that the two views of King Edward’s character differ _toto cœlo_. But then, whereas Sir Sidney Lee had no intimate knowledge of the King, Lord Esher describes a man with whom he lived for many years in that confidential intimacy which Dr. Johnson held to be the necessary condition for writing a good biography. The worst of it is that though Lord Esher’s book will be widely read now, it is bound to share the fate of all books, which like men, have their day and then die. _Habent sua fata libelli._ With the “Dictionary of National Biography” the case is different: that will remain on the shelves of every library, public and private, for many generations, and will be consulted as an authority long after the writers, like their subjects, shall have faded into the misty land of ghosts. That is why articles in such an important book of reference should be subjected before publication to the strictest and most impartial examination. Afterwards it is no use. “The written word stands.” Even should Sir Sidney Lee himself, in the fuller life of King Edward upon which he is said to be engaged, endeavour to modify, soften, or even contradict some of the statements in his article, it will not be possible for him to correct the false impression which those pages will create in the minds of men of a future generation. Historians will turn to them and will say that since this was written immediately after the tragedy of 1910 by so eminent a man of letters, it must represent the contemporary judgment of the King’s personality. Great is the responsibility. The picture which Lord Esher gives of the childhood and boyhood of the Prince of Wales under the somewhat austere and strict tutelage of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort cannot but fill his readers with sympathy. Here was a child, a boy, a young lad, hedged round by rules and regulations which must have pressed upon him like a strait-waistcoat. Ardent and full of the highest spirits, he was cramped by such a discipline as mercifully none of us have known. What would the boy not have given for a game of football? How he would have loved to drive a cricket ball over the boundary! He, whom I have seen as a man of fifty, booted and skated, keenly playing a game of hockey on the ice? No games were there for him, no free association with playmates of his own age. A boy or two, carefully selected, sent up to Windsor from Eton to stand about in hopeless shyness in the presence of tutors, or even under THE Eye.