Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster Mr. Strachey shows more approbation than usual, this portrait has not given universal satisfaction. It has rather surprisingly called forth an indignant protest from Dr. Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of the human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward "perstringes" the biographer brings us round to that biographer's side. For Mrs. Ward has positively the indiscretion, astounding in a writer of her learning and experience, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to sharing one of the meanest prejudices of the English commonplace mind, which has always resented the use of that delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs. Ward does not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers herself bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use of irony to be "unintelligent." In support of this amazing statement she quotes some wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By the light of recent revelations, whether Sainte-Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly perfidious. But, to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, "doomed to failure" because they used irony as a weapon? Was Heine and is Anatole France conspicuous for want of intelligence? And, after all, ought not Mrs. Ward to remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she had a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote _Friendship's Garland_? While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for employing irony in his investigation of character, the subject leads on to what may be regarded as a definite fault in his method. A biographer should be sympathetic; not blind, not indulgent, but _sympathetic_. He should be able to enter into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to do so. It is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey fails. His personages are like puppets observed from a great height by an amiable but entirely superior intelligence. The peculiar aim of Mr. Strachey, his desire to lower our general conception of the Victorian Age, tempts him to exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the temptation. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870--"he despised Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him"--is not ironic, it is contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey but that of a timid and blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceive that the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any other capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional references to Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of hovering superiority is annoying.