15 FEBRUARY 1946, Page 14

THE BEST BIOGRAPHIES

SIR,—In A Bookman's Letters, the late Sir W. Robertson Nicholl, editor of The Bookman, gives this list of the six best biographies in order of merit: t, Boswell's Johnson ; 2, Lockhares Life of Scott ; 3, Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë; 4, Trevelyan's Macaulay ; 5, Froude's Carlyle ; 6, Morley's Life of Gladstone. In his monograph on "Lord Randolph Churchill" by Winston Churchill, Lord Rosebery says: "The author has produced under great difficulties a fascinating book, one to be marked perhaps among the first half-dozen biographies in our language."