IN this sequel to "Those Earnest Victorians," Mr. Wingfield-Stratford sets himself the complex task of describing the several stages of twilight that followed the day of the mid-Victorians. In considering the diverse aspects of the last three decades of the century, his gifts for summary and the choice of significant detail enable him to be consistently solid, without opacity, and hence, consistently absorbing. The miscellaneous course of empire, comprising shoes as well as ships, and cabbages along with kings; the "crumbling of the old certainties," the decline of traditional society, the rise of sport for sport's sake, and art for Oscar Wilde's and Whistler's sake, the economic disasters and political follies all enter into the composition which Mr. Stratford draws with a painstaking hand. Not only grandmother's world, but her ideas receive pointed analysis. The result is very satisfying to read, not merely as pageantry, but as history, and as a thorough quietus to all the half-truths and misconceptions which surround our ideas of our forbears.

The author is not content with mere depiction, however; he has a truly modern conscience, which he insists on venting conscience, which he insists on venting whenever the slightest occasion offers itself. At the beginning he makes it clear that the Victorians were building their house upon sand; he spectre of the unleashed machine haunts him as it did Henry Adams, who it will be remembered, also dated the end, of an epoch at 1870. In the closing sections, he calls up a picture of (old) Charlie Marx, wordless and forbidding, just beginning to cast his lengthened shadow, seen alike by the idle aristocrat and by the workingman. The Philistines, dancing upon the roof at Gaza, were evidently not more ill-fated than the joyous throngs who idled down the years after the first Versailles, unconscious that their house was tottering to its final destruction in 1914.

"The Victorian Sunset" is not wholly successful as intellectual history. Despite the brilliance of the chapters on the first transition from the seventies, on aristocracy and society, on "The New Machiavellianism" and "The New Bourgeoisie," it often resolves itself into summary, and nothing more. The biographical vignettes, of Disraeli, Wilde and others are striking and original, but in several instances questionable; and there is occasionally a suspicious naivete in the point of view. This may well be a defect of the stylist and not the historian. The writing of the book certainly is marred by a sort of false urbanity and lacks the flair for effortless insinuation such as Lytton Strachey displayed in treating of the same period. Despite these minor shortcomings, Mr. Wingfield-Stratford has probably written, the most comprehensive and enjoyable of all the recent books on the Victorians.