Very few modern biographies cover so wide a range of varied interests and of secret history as these two large volumes in which Mr. Frederic Whyte has collected the intimate papers and the contemporary records of W. T. Stead. The relations between this hopelessly impulsive and quixotic editor and the men and women whom he singled out for special hero-worship give an extraordinary psychological interest to the biography; and none of the great figures who fill its pages stands out more picturesquely than Cardinal Manning in the last years of his life.

The great Cardinal appears inevitably in a somewhat theatrical light in this bewildering book of stunts and moral fervours; but it is clear that he had enough theatrical instinct to respond in some degree at least to the melodramatic instincts of his admirer. And Stead himself, with his complete incapacity for understanding any other point of view than his own journalistic enthusiasms for each new discovery that he made, seems to have been satisfied that the Cardinal shared his own aspirations completely.