Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/5



HIS volume contains the lives of notable persons who died in the years 1912-1921. It has been planned on less ample lines than the Supplement which was published by Messrs. Smith, Elder in 1912, under the editorship of the late Sir Sidney Lee. That work, dealing with the obits of eleven years, included 1,660 lives and extended to 2,035 pages. It was a bold and attractive experiment. If, however, the same policy of selection were to be pursued throughout the present century, the result would be to add about 15,000 lives (and nearly 20,000 pages of print) to the main work, which (with the three supplementary volumes published in 1901) contains a little more than 30,000 substantive articles. Est modus in rebus. A continuation on such a scale would be beyond the means of most of those for whose use such a work is primarily intended. The editors have endeavoured to reduce in some degree the average length of articles, so far as this could be done without sacrificing essential facts. But, whenever it was possible and seemed desirable to obtain personal appreciations of the kind that only contemporaries can supply, room has been found for such material, in the belief that it may be useful to the future historian of this age.

The period of time which these biographies cover is more than a hundred years. The late Lord Wemyss was born in 1818; Francis Bashforth, the mathematician, and Alexander Campbell Fraser, the metaphysical philosopher, in 1819. The decade 1820-1829 is represented by a substantial list of names, among which appear those of Joseph Arch, the pioneer of agricultural trade-unionism, Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, the naval designer, Sir Sandford Fleming, Sir Edward Fry, Lord Halsbury, Augustus Jessopp, Lord Lindley, Lord Lister, Lord Llandaff, Lord Peel, Lord Mount Stephen, Sir Charles Tupper, Alfred Russel Wallace and John Westlake, the international lawyer. With the next decade, 1880-18389, we enter the full stream of the era which this volume chiefly represents: this is the decade which produced Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Sir Francis Burnand, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Courtney of Penwith, Sir William Crookes, Emily Davies, William De Morgan, Sir Michael Hicks Beach (Lord St. Aldwyn), Thomas Hodgkin, Shadworth Hodgson, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Sir John Mahaffy, Sir Clements Markham, Sir James Murray, the lexicographer, Sir Andrew Noble, Sir Edward Poynter, Lord Roberts, Henry John Roby, Frederic Seebohm, Walter Skeat, Philip Webb, Lord Welby, William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’), Lord Wolseley, and Sir Evelyn Wood.

From these instances it will be evident that the spirit of the early v