There has recently been a notable output of books of "personalities" and critical appreciations, contemporary, historical and (for the most part) iconoclastic. One may therefore say that Mr. HORACE G. HUTCHINSON is distinctly of the movement in compiling his _Portraits of the 'Eighties_ (UNWIN). This is certainly a volume that anyone can dip into with instruction and entertainment, even if (to be quite honest) the former is likely to predominate. The fact is that one has become so used to the satirical method in portraiture, in which the attack is all and the subject emerges only as a beriddled target, that an ordinary pen-picture, however faithful, is apt to seem heavy by contrast. Mr. HUTCHINSON certainly is not of the slingers; he will just "tell you about" the notable persons of his period, setting down nothing in malice, omitting little however banal, and rejecting no aphorism or anecdote as outworn. Perhaps his nearest approach to the popular method is a very occasional touch of gentle irony, as when he permits himself to say of G. W. E. RUSSELL (to whose _Portraits of the Seventies_ the present volume is intended as a sequel) that he "used to drive about London in a carriage picked out in colours that did not suggest that he sought seclusion." I have no space for the barest list of the sitters in Mr. HUTCHINSON'S crowded picture of a time rich in character, his treatment of which aims rather at covering a wide ground than at intimacy of detail. To mention but one, it is interesting to compare his General GORDON with the recent presentment of him by another hand. If the result is more creditable to Mr. HUTCHINSON'S kindliness than to his wit, it may serve as an apt comment on the whole book. * * * * *