The best personality portrait with which I am familiar is that of John Addington Symonds, sketched and painted by himself and finished by his friend Horatio F. Brown. It is a model psychological biography which concerns itself particularly with the nature and display of the temperament of a man who was a strange mixture of mysticism and practicality, scepticism and credulity, piety and sensuousness, emotion and intellect; and who had, with it all, extraordinary energy, painstaking industry, tireless application. Practically a life-long invalid, and without the spur of poverty, he accomplished a stupendous amount of literary work of the first order: biography, essays, criticism, poetry, translation--which is likely to be more familiar to coming generations than it was to his own. His history of the Italian Renaissance, his translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s _Memoirs_ and his version of the sonnets of Michael Angelo give him a permanent place in literature. Any one who would fit himself to recognise the neuropathic constitution, the manic-depressive personality, the artistic temperament, the hedonistic attitude, the religious nature, can do so by reading comprehensively Horatio Brown’s splendid biography of John Addington Symonds. Possessors of the phlegmatic temperament may get neither profit nor pleasure from reading it, but all others will, and many will get nourishing food for thought. And now comes his daughter to say tactfully and deferentially that her father was not at all the kind of man that his friend the Venetian historian depicted; at least she wants to tell the world that there were important facets of John Addington Symonds’ nature that were not revealed by it. _Out of the Past_ is a fascinating biography and it should succeed in reviving interest in an unusual personality who wore the mantle of Pico della Mirandola with grace and distinction.