E. Barrington has made Lady Hamilton come to life once more in the pages of her novel; she has caught her charm and her personality, understood her perfections and vices, and she has succeeded even in so grading her praise and disparagement that the reader is constantly aware of the scullery-maid masquerading as ambassadress, and of the demi-goddess hidden in the bosom of the protected fille de joie. Her real place was with the lowly, and she was never more at home than when she could shed her acquired English and her elegant manners and indulge in the language and activities that she had loved in her youth. E. Barrington has made all this clear, and she has given each startling contradiction in the make-up of the Divine Lady its proper emphasis—with the result that we wonder at such whims of nature, at such diversity of characteristics in the same person, without ever doubting the veracity of the author. It seems scarcely plausible that Lady Hamilton should have been as adaptable and sensitive to environment as she appears to have been—that she should have loved Greville with the loyalty and patient submission which she displayed, that she should have been so faithful and loving to Lord Hamilton until she met Nelson, and that she should have felt for the latter the irresistible passion which was the cause of her ruin. We marvel at the union of talents that occurred in her; the aristocracy of her singing voice, the vulgarity of her speaking voice, her mastery of wild horses and her inborn gift for the terpsichorean arts, her tact and diplomacy, and all the qualities which made her at the same time a divine lady and a prostitute.

Her most extraordinary gift was her power to feel the rôle she had to play in order to win hearts; and the diversity of her accomplishments made such conquest easy for her. She won hearts, and she lost hearts, but when we turn the last pages of the book, we have only admiration for the Lady who inspired Nelson, and carried the renown of her country beyond its confines at a time when international affairs were nearly as muddled as they are a hundred years after her death.

The Divine Lady is the kind of biography which makes one care more for fiction—and the sort of fiction which makes one wonder why novelists do not write more about historical characters whose lives and personalities often surpass anything that imagination could dictate.

Miss Marjorie Strachey has written the latest word in the line of fictional biography: The Nightingale; A Life of Chopin. She has blended the facts of his life with the romance of fiction. By a series of sketches, of fugitive evocations, she has added to the permanency of Chopin as a man, and especially as an artist. She has made his genius permeate his actions, and she has endowed him with the dream-qualities of poetry and the realised qualities of practical life. Chopin is no longer an unapproachable genius; he is life itself seen through the veil of romance.

Miss Strachey has not done for her hero what E. Barrington did for Lady Hamilton; she has not called attention to his “amours,” not even the one with George Sand; her task lay, not in giving us the emotional understanding of the musician, but in creating a true portrait of him. This she did by interweaving his correspondence with his conversations; his friends with his surroundings. They all form part of the background on which he shines all the more brilliantly that it is never exaggerated, and his life was enough of a romance to impart to the biography its qualities of ethereal dream without addition or distortion of facts on the part of the biographer.

The Nightingale is more to be praised for what it does not say than for what it says. It shows restraint, dignity and poise, which are the accompaniment necessary to a biography of Chopin.