hies,
it is yet conducted with so artful an economy as to give the impression,
to an uninstructed reader, that nothing essential about the career of
Manning has been omitted. To produce this impression gifts of a very
unusual order were required, since the writer, pressed on all sides by a
plethora of information, instead of being incommoded by it, had to seem
to be moving smoothly in an atmosphere of his own choosing, and to be
completely unembarrassed by his material. He must have the air of
saying, in Froude's famous impertinence, "This is all we know, and more
than all, yet nothing to what the angels know." In the face of a whole
literature of controversy and correspondence, after a storm of Purcell
and Hutton, Ward and Mozley and Liddon tearing at one another's throats,
Mr. Lytton Strachey steps delicately on to the stage and says, in a low
voice, "Come here and I will tell you all about a funny ecclesiastic who
had a Hat, and whose name was Henry Edward Manning. It will not take us
long, and ever afterwards, if you hear that name mentioned, you will
know everything about him which you need to remember." It is audacious,
and to many people will seem shocking, but it is very cleverly done.

The study of Florence Nightingale is an even better example of Mr.
Strachey's method, since she is the one of his four subjects for whom he
betrays some partiality. "The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile
fancy painted her," and it has greatly entertained Mr. Strachey to chip
the Victorian varnish off and reveal the iron will beneath. His first
chapter puts it in one of his effective endings:--

"Her mother was still not quite resigned; surely Florence might at
least spend the summer in the country. At this, indeed, among her
intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. 'We are ducks,' she said
with tears in her eyes, 'who have hatched a wild swan.' But the
poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched, it
was an eagle."

It is therefore as an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked bill and
crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; and the Swan of
Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr.
Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, rushing
spirit of philanthropy. He gloats over its ravages; its irresistible
violence of purpose. It is an evident pleasure to him to be able to
detach so wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambient