Ons of the strongest and perhaps least creditable features of the public taste of the time isthe mania for minute personal details about everybody of eminence. The desire to know what persons who have achieved any success in life eat and wear is wholly disproportionate to the importance of the circumstances themselves, or the intrinsie greatness of the men and women about whom this astounding curiosity exists, At the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England" excited a smile owing to the biographer's foudness for inventories of costumes and details of potty expenditure, but at all events the indefatigable lady bad an archaeological excuse and could allege that the minute particulars to which she called popular attention had an antiquarian interest. They helped us to realise what manner of men and women moved about the courts of the Angevin kings. But what conceivable excuse or protext is there for writing articles which violate
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.