Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie, by COMTE FLEURY. Here likewise the historical interest is as strong as the biographical.
Lady Palmerston and Her Times, by MABELL, COUNTESS OF AIRLIE. Of value for its picture of the period from George III. to the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
PAUL VAN DYKE’S Catherine de Medici, in two volumes, now in its third printing, is distinguished by lucidity, an avoidance of easy ornament and floridity, and by great literary charm.
More Purely Personal.
The Letters of Lord and Lady Wolseley, edited by SIR GEORGE ARTHUR. The intimacies of a great soldier and his brilliant wife, with many glimpses of British society from 1870 to 1911.
Margot Asquith: An Autobiography. Volumes III. and IV., although dealing with British war politics, are chiefly personal in interest.
Memories of Later Years, by OSCAR BROWNING. By a much-travelled Englishman, a friend of Queen Mary, Lord Curzon and Lloyd George, now past eighty. He deals principally with persons and events since 1897. Arthur Bartlett Maurice, reviewing the book in the New York Herald, speaks of the book as “a narrative which gives the flavor of Europe of yesterday, of a world that is gone.” The volume is a mine of anecdotes of the great.
Post Mortem, by C. MACLAURIN, M.D., somewhat resembles Dr. Joseph Collins’s The Doctor Looks at Literature—only in this case historical figures are the persons dissected. Henry VIII., the historian Gibbon, Joan of Arc, and Samuel Pepys are some of the subjects.
A Nineteenth Century Romance, by MAJOR C. H. DUDLEY WARD. A love story in two generations based on authentic letters and beginning in the days of Napoleon the Great with the love letters of Dora Best to George Brett and continuing with the love affair of their son who, in 1897, became Viscount Esher.
Lady Rose Weigall, by RACHEL WEIGALL. Lady Rose was the favourite niece of the great Duke of Wellington. Her long life (1834-1921) brought her in contact with Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein, Jenny Lind, Bismarck, Browning, Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, Dickens, the Empress Eugenie and many royalties. Not the least interesting things are her letters exchanged with Germany during the World War.