Lockhart’s _Life of Walter Scott_ may be said to be the most admirable biography in the English language, after Boswell’s _Samuel Johnson_. Lockhart had all the odds in his favour when he wrote his _magnum opus_. He had had the advantage of years of close intimacy with Walter Scott, who liked him as a writer of promise and achievement, before he loved him as a son; and Lockhart’s sensitive and impressionable mind was the best fitted receptacle for the genius of his father-in-law. He devoted years to the writing of the biography which made him famous, and he made it a labour of joy. It is at once objective and subjective; it includes all the characteristics of the great Scotch writer; it is criticism and biography combined. Trevelyan came near accomplishing a similar success in _The Life and Letters of Macaulay_, a most satisfactory biography. _The Life of Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield_, by Monypenny and Buckle, an illuminating, accurate and complete account of a complex personality and of his ancestors, compares favourably with both of them. The modern biographies worthy to hold a place with these great ones are Sidney Lee’s _Life of Shakespeare_ and Lytton Strachey’s _Queen Victoria_. There probably never was a more tangled jungle to explore, survey and stake out than that presented by the traditions, theories and conjectures that have grown around the greatest poet since Dante. Sir Sidney Lee succeeded in giving an exhaustive summary of everything credible that has been written about Shakespeare and he gave the _coup de grâce_ to much that was not only fictitious but monstrous, particularly about the sonnets. There are few biographies that display such tact, insight, erudition, industry and judgment, and if popularity is in direct relationship to merit, it may be interesting to note that it has had ten editions since its first publication in 1898. The only one that rivals it is Strachey’s _Queen Victoria_, but Strachey’s task was much easier. It is, however, a great feat to have made known to her own people the Queen who reigned over them for nearly sixty years!