CURRENT LITERATURE.
MR. ASQUITH.
Biographies of the living are now too frequent to call for discussion or epigram upon the principles involved. Mr. Harold Spender "presents" Herbert Henry Asquith (George Newnes, 2s. 6d. net), and gives a plain, unvarnished tale of a brilliant youth fighting his way through drudgery to eminence, and yet endowed with the remarkable faculty of being able to "switch off " care and worry for the moment- a faculty without which perhaps no man could bear the load of responsibility which now lies, on the Prime Minister's shoulders. Mr. Spender has enough good taste to confine himself almost entirely to Mr. Asquith's public life. His book is free from servants'-hall gossip on the one band, but on the other adds nothing to modern history by any attempt to weigh the effects of policy or legislation. One good party, man writing about another has no faults to find with his hero or his party and sees no good in their opponents. There is no adulation here, but a stolid prepossession, which makes it possible to write en uncritical book of this kind without offence to any one. But Mr. Asquith's great personal position in the Government, and the confidence of the nation in him at this time, rest on broader foundations than those that can be laid by a volume of these pretensions. There is only a brief sentence quoted'here and therefrom Mr. Asquith's speeches— a few more might well have been given, not only from.political speeches, to illustrate him at his best.
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