The "Swinburne" is furnished by Edmund Gosse, whose adequate equipment for the task includes "personal recollections extending over more than forty years." Passages of his portrait of the radiant poet are the most colorful in these volumes of the Dictionary. By way of critical discussion the writer says: "It is a very remarkable circumstance, which must be omitted in no outline of his intellectual life, that his opinions, on politics, on literature, on art, on life itself, were formed in boyhood, and that though he expanded he scarcely advanced in any single direction after he was twenty. If growth had continued as it began, he must have been the prodigy of the world. Even his art was at its height when he was five and twenty." The Whistler article is by Sir Walter Armstrong (who writes also on Holman Hunt) and is, one feels, the most judicial summary that has appeared on the most controversial subject, one can readily recall, of the epoch closed. A very clear statement of a principle of the art of painting is this: "For years his work bore much the same relation to Japanese art as all fine painting does to nature. He took from Japanese ideals the beauties he admired, and re-created them as expressions of his own personality." There is one delightful anecdote, in E. V. Lucas's sketch of Phil May. His Punch editor, Sir Francis Burnand, tells a story to the effect that on being asked at a club for a loan of fifty pounds, May produced all he had--half that amount--and then abstained from the club for some time for fear of meeting the borrower, because he felt that "he still owed him twenty-five pounds." Sensible persons will read with satisfaction the just article by T. F. Henderson on that fine figure Henley, "one of the main supports," said Meredith, "of good literature in our time." Many good folks will like to look up Leslie Stephen, the first editor of this Dictionary, "who enjoyed the affectionate admiration of his most enlightened contemporaries." The article is by the present editor, Sir Sidney Lee. Æsthetically minded persons may read about William Sharpe. Among the painters are Watts (biographer, Sir Sidney Colvin) and Orchardson. The "Seymour Haden" is furnished by A. M. Hind. Memoirs of Sir Henry Irving, Sir Theodore Martin, and Herbert Spencer come in this supplement. And so on. A piece of American history is related here, too, in the account of Edward Lawrence Godkin, founder of _The Nation_. A subject of emotional literary controversy at the present moment is treated by Thomas Seccombe in his article on George Gissing. The general qualities of the Dictionary may be clearly observed in this notice. When the first volume of this second supplement--A to Evans--was issued not long ago rumors reached us of some agitation occasioned in England by the unepitaphical character of the memoirs of Edward VII. Well, discrimination was not made against a King. The frankness of this high tribunal in its calm recital of facts is striking.