Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. Whibley. I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in his volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr.