What is the author's tone in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey?

The tone is satirical. Almost everything about Manning is satirized: his active early life as a country clergyman ("he was an excellent judge of horseflesh") his diary entries recording his struggles with the terrible temptations of ambition; his earnest reading of the Church Fathers to assuage his religious doubts; and the obsessive care with which, in old age, he pored over his papers that recorded the "vanished incidents of a remote past": "He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers drop unknown mysteries into the flames."