In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey lamented the inability of English-speaking writers to hold their own against the French eulogists: “We have had,” he wrote, “no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.”
Reading James Rosen’s collection of William F. Buckley Jr.’s encomia of departed souls, I was reminded of Strachey’s words, for, like Strachey himself, Buckley was a writer of English who was also a master of the vita brevis. He “devoted especial care to his eulogies,” Rosen writes, using them not only to mourn the dead but also “as a kind of conjuring act: a final chance to savor the deceased.” In bringing the pieces together in a single, deftly edited volume, Rosen has assembled an epicure’s delight of a portrait gallery.
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