This was the father of Fox Maule, second Baron Panmure, of whom Mr. Strachey has so much to say. Evidently he was a Regency type, as the son was a Victorian. Determined not to resemble his father, Fox Maule early became a settled and industrious M.P., and in 1846 Lord John Russell made him Secretary of War. He held the same post under Lord Palmerston from 1855 to 1858. Nothing could dislodge him from office; not even the famous despatch "Take care of Dawb" could stir him. In 1860 he became eleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years later, having enjoyed every distinction, even that of President of the Royal Military Asylum. He was "unco guid," as pious as his father had been profane, but he had no social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which can at this distance of time be discerned. Florence Nightingale called him the Bison, and his life's energy seems to have been expended in trying, often with success, to frustrate every single practical reform which she suggested. To the objection that Mr. Strachey has depicted the heroine as "an ill-tempered, importunate spinster, who drove a statesman to his death," he might conceivably reply that if history, grown calm with the passage of years, does so reveal her, it is rather absurd to go on idealising her. Why not study the real Eagle in place of the fabulous Swan? It is difficult to condemn Mr. Strachey along this line of argument. The early Victorians liked what was definable and tangible; they were "ponderous mechanists of style." Even in their suggestions of change they preserved an impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress, a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition upon character. Their preoccupation with moral ideas tinged the whole of their surroundings, their literature, their art, their outlook upon life. That the works of Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny, should have been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intense epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect how careful Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never to tamper with "the deep sense of moral evil." This apprehension of the rising immorality of the world, against which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened" was dominant in no spirit more than in that of Mr. Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey gives a somewhat deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we have passed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of the atmosphere in which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed. We are not sure that Mr. Strachey acted very wisely in selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his four subjects, since the great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all. When he entered the Church George III. was on the throne; his accomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV.; he died when the Victorian Age was just beginning. He was a forerunner, but hardly a contemporary.