Mr. Christie's qualities as an historian are critical rather than philosophical, scholarly rather than pictorial. He laudably prides himself upon scrupulous accuracy, and has the patient industry and conscientious truthfulness which deem no labour too great, no minuteness too trivial, for the achievement of this result. His work, therefore, is a critical rather than a constructive work: or, rather, he constructs by a critical process of vindication. The first Earl of Shaftesbury has fared badly at the hands of history. 'He lived in times of violent party fury, and calumny, which fiercely assailed him living, pursued him in his grave, and still darkens his name. He lived in times when the public had little or no authentic information about the proceedings of members of the Government or of Parliament, when errors in judging public men were more easy than now, and when venal pamphleteers, poets, and play-writers drove a profitable trade in libels on public men.' Shaftesbury not only fell into the hands of political enemies, but his political tergiversations rendered his vindication difficult for his friends. A young man of twenty-one at the commencement of the Civil War, his life ran parallel with the events of that eventful period; he lived through the Restoration to within five years of the Revolution of 1688, and was closely connected with political affairs through the greater part of his life. A Royalist in early life, he became an ardent Parliamentarian; a Royalist again, he played an important part with Monk in bringing back Charles II.; and the problem which Mr. Christie has set himself is to vindicate his honour in these convenient changes; and with the array of great names against him, including even those of Hallam and Macaulay, an arduous task it is; the invective of Macaulay is almost as terrible as that of Dryden. Of course such a career affords rich material for writers on both sides. Dryden, whose unscrupulous pen is no condemnation, unmercifully consigned Shaftesbury to infamy in the judgment of the multitude who read poetry, and know nothing of political history, by making him the Achitophel of his great satire, published just a week before Shaftesbury's trial for high treason, and by lampooning him in 'The Medal,' referring to the medal which Shaftesbury's friends had struck on his acquittal. Hume, again, by the power of his literary genius, for a long time brought popular condemnation upon all Whigs and Whiggery, and until his Tory proclivities for the Stuarts were counteracted by recent and more careful historians, made the worse appear the better reason. These falsehoods of detraction, as Mr. Christie justly observed, 'produced counter-falsehoods of excuse and eulogy, and the result has been a greater agglomeration of errors.' In his old age, Shaftesbury began an autobiography, doubtless with a view of self-vindication, but proceeded only so far as his twenty-first year. Locke, who resided in Shaftesbury's house many years as his physician and friend, meditated a biography, but only collected a few materials for it. The fourth Earl, the son of the author of the 'Characteristics,' placed all the materials he possessed in the hands of a Mr. Benjamin Martin, for the purpose of a biography, which he began in 1734, but he was unfitted for the task, and the result was unsatisfactory. The MS., in 1766, was put, for improvement, into the hands of Dr. Sharpe, Master of the Temple; then into those of Dr. Kippis, editor of the 'Biographia Britannica,' after which it was printed, but the fifth Earl was so dissatisfied with it that the whole impression was destroyed, with the exception of two copies. Mr. Bentley republished it in 1836, edited--incompetently, Mr. Christie says--by Mr. George Wingrove Cooke. Stringer, Shaftesbury's solicitor, seems to have furnished Locke with information, fragments of which, in MS., in Locke's handwriting, are among the Shaftesbury papers at St. Giles's; but Stringer is inaccurate and confused. With these materials, and, of course, access to all the family papers, Mr. Christie has constructed his history--or, rather, his vindication--for his book has, throughout, the character of a polemic. It would have been more interesting, and more generally valuable, had Mr. Christie written an affirmative history relegating to appendices or footnotes the polemical discussions which different points demanded. As it is, he has furnished material and sifted it, for the use of the historian proper, and he has done this with rare acuteness and scrupulous fairness.