STRACHEY

This is Queen Victoria's eminent biographer caught in the act of composition by his great friend. Sir Max Beerbohm, caricaturist, author, wit and dandy. Last week Sir Max's brisk, elegiac tribute (Lytton Strachey; Knopf; $1) to his late great friend was published in the U.S. It was also the tribute of a dying age to one of the most distinguished of its dead. Wrote Sir Max: "We are told . . . that the present century is to be the Century of the Common Man. We are all of us to go down on our knees . . . and worship the Common Man. . . . Well, I am an old man, and old men are not ready converts to new religions. This one does not stir my soul.... I like to think that on the morning of January the first, in the year 2000, mankind will be free to . . . rise from its knees and look about it for some other, and perhaps more rational, form of faith. I like also to think that ... in the great pale platitude of the meantime, there will be, as hitherto, a few . . . people likely to read ... the works of Lytton Strachey."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.