Miscellany

Abstract

THERE exists, nowadays, no lack of examples for those who would practise the difficult art of biography. At one end of the scale appears Hill's “Boswell”, edited anew in six magnificent volumes, and still remaining, despite the new knowledge which has accrued to our generation, an enduring monument to Hill's genius as an editor. At the other end we have these florin biographies, wherein he who desires to discourse learnedly may gain his knowledge at the expense of an hour's reading. But, to invert a well-known obiter dictum, easy reading means condemned hard writing, and that author has his work cut out who would compress into a hundred and forty small octavo pages, a critical biography which shall tell something of the man, something of his work, and shall descend to those pedestrian but necessary-details of fact and date which your tendentious or psychological biographer is disposed to ignore.

Faraday.

By Thomas Martin. (Great Lives Series, No. 40.) Pp. 144. (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd., 1934.) 2s. net.