Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/9



present Supplement has been undertaken by Mrs. George M. Smith, now the proprietor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and has been edited by Sir Sidney Lee. It furnishes biographies of noteworthy persons who died between 22 Jan. 1901 and 31 Dec. 1911. The former date was the day of Queen Victoria's death, and the First Supplement, which was published in the autumn of 1901, brought the record of national biography down to that limit. The bounds are now extended by nearly eleven years. The new volumes treat exclusively of those whom death has qualified for admission within the prescribed period.

When the present Supplement was planned the death of King Edward VII was not anticipated. Among the great names which the present volume includes, that of the late King is bound to attract chief attention. His memoir, like that of Queen Victoria in the First Supplement, is from the pen of the Editor. It is an attempt made it is believed for the first time to co-ordinate the manifold activities of the sovereign in a just historic and biographic spirit. To the information which is already scattered through numerous published sketches and books of reminiscence at home and abroad much has been added, through the courtesy of those associated with the late King, from unpublished and unwritten sources. It is hoped that the result will be to remove some widely disseminated misapprehensions and to furnish some new and authentic elucidations. Although the article is shorter than that on Queen Victoria, it is on a larger scale than is habitual to the Dictionary. But the prominent place which the late King filled for half a century in the nation's public life, both before and after his accession, seemed, in the absence of a full record elsewhere, to compel a treatment which should be as exhaustive and authoritative as the writer's knowledge allowed, with due regard to the recent dates of the events.

The late King had a personal relation with the Dictionary which,