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and again to be liars as reckless as they are futile, and the efforts these mealy-mouthed apologists for Gorman crimes have been compelled to make in their attempts to explain away Bethmann-Hollweg's famous excursion into truth leave me with such a feeling of nausea that for once I find myself almost applauding Maximilian Harden when he writes, " May the Teuton devil throttle those whiners whose pleas for excuses make us ludicrous in these hours of lofty experience." What this "lofty experience" consists of Dr. White can tell you with proof irrefutable and absolutely damning.

In Unofficial (Secker) Mr. Bohun Lynch has chosen to study, with more sympathy than public opinion would be likely to sanction, that type whose world fell crashing about it at the first shock of war—in a sense not easily comprehended by the normal man. It is the type—artist, philanthropist, philosopher, dilettante—to whom visions, dreams, disquisitions, a perception and expression of beauty, seemed the all-important pattern upon a rather tiresome, ugly and unnecessary background of common life. The background is suddenly smashed with a dreadful violence, and the patterns are left, as it were, "bombinating in a vacuum," like the Schoolmen's chimera. It is a real tragedy of the spirit, and many of our modern young men have had their hour of agony before their great decision. And it is in this fateful day an agony peculiar to the youth of England; for all who know anything of self-mastery know that to make is an immeasurably harder thing than, however heroically, to accept difficult decisions. To their great honour they have, even the least likely among them, so often made them unflinchingly, like that young poet whose ashes now lie in Lemnos. Mr. Lynch has complicated his hero's decision by involving him in an honourable obligation to look after a helpless young wife deserted by a blackguard husband. Naturally everyone diagnoses the usual relationship, but the fact that it is so far a Quixotic tie (liable, no doubt, to dissolve into the other kind) complicates the problem. The question lies: Is it this man's duty to enlist or to protect the life he has so far sheltered? The author is not the less true to life as it is, in distinction to what it is supposed to be, in making him determine on the final decision for enlistment in a momentary mood of exaltation which has a swift reaction of doubt. The play of motive and argument on a subtle and fundamentally honest mind and temperament is very skilfully suggested. It is the most real war novel I have yet struck.

Summer Friendships (Grant Richards) is an agreeable specimen of the touring story, as inaugurated by the late William Black. I am not saying that Dorothy Muir has a pen as skilful as that of the chronicler of the Phaeton, but she manages to make her travellers and their very mild adventures sufficiently entertaining. There are some seven or eight persons—the number varies—voyaging through Scotland in two caravans; and by an ingenious device they tell the tale in a series of letters addressed to the mother of two of them, who is also a mutual friend of the others. I liked especially the rather subtle way in which this unseen personage is drawn in at the end to have her share in the inevitable engagements. But you needn't bother about the story, which is of the slightest. The characters are the charm of the book; they all write exceedingly pleasant letters with a somewhat feminine tone to them. They write, indeed, as clever women talk, delightfully, but a little too much. What seems most to have impressed the publishers are the illustrations, "forty-eight pages of them on a new plan." All that this means is that somebody had a camera, and that the resulting snap-shots are reproduced. They are very good ones, even if the continued reappearance of the caravan as the central object makes a little for monotony; but as for being on a new plan, well, any one who has ever endured the album of "What-we-took-when-we-were-away " could contradict this flatly. Still, I repeat that Summer Friendships is an agreeable holiday book; and one, moreover, that might be of practical use to those about to caravan without previous experience of the art.

I have lately suffered some genuine disappointment in reading "Richard Dehan's" volumes of short stories, so that her triumphant return to novel-writing in The Man of Iron (Heinemann) fills me with the purest pleasure; and in spite of my personal conviction that the most wholesome literature for war-time is to be found in the works of Jane Austen or in Cranford, I confess that I make an exception in favour of this vigorous tale of Bismarck and 1870. The author tells us that the subject was long chosen and the book nearly finished when the August of 1914 came to give it an extraordinary aptness. "Richard Dehan" really knows her subject, and there are telling scenes in England, in Germany and in France, especially in the zone of war. In fact, the hero and heroine, whose duty it is to hold the plot together, find it a task nearly, if not quite, too much for them. But in any case, though the interest necessarily centres round the giant figures of Bismarck and Moltke, who bulk huge through the book, I never forgot or wished to forget the young Irishman, Patrick Breagh, and his charming lady, Juliette, true daughter of France. How they cross the path of the Man of Iron, and know him in his strength and weakness, is fully told—much too well, indeed, for me to spoil things by telling you about it. The last nine months may possibly have given you an unusual, even a professional, interest in wars in general and the German way with them in particular; in which event you will be as grateful as I am to "Richard Dehan" for a romance so well woven into a piece of living history.

"THE RIGHT TO KILL. LAST WEEKS."

Surely an optimistic view of the duration of the War.

Antique Dealer (to grandson, who had made a new placard). "Genius, my child—genius! Put it in the window at once."