Carrots, in which Miss Elliott appears with her husband, Mr. Forbes Robertson, is now being played at the Scala Theatre in front of For the Crown. This charming little play tells a story of husband and wife, and their child, "Carrots." The woman is a shrew, and her husband is very unhappy. Carrots" is unhappy, too, in the household. His father, realising this, is drawn towards "Carrots," and consoles himself for his estrangement from his wife by the love for his son The Library 66 BOOKS TO ORDER THIS WEEK GENERAL LITERATURE The Guide to Fairyland." Written and illustrated by Dion Clayton Calthrop. (Alston Rivers: 7s. 6d.) "The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton)." Cheap edition. (Edward Arnold: 6s.) "Notes from My South Sea Log." By Louis Becke. (Werner Laurie: 6s. net.) "Gesta Romanorum." Translated by Charles Swan. (Routledge's Early Novelists' Library: 6s. net.) "Wood Myth and Fable." Written and illustrated by Ernest Thompson Seton. (Hodder and Stoughton: 55. net.) The Town It is seldom that one week brings forth such a crop of good books as it has been our fortune to read this week. We still have Lucas's Lamb by us, and in another "dip," lasting over a whole evening, came across many more features of interest which make us regard this great biographical effort from several new aspects. Lamb and his friends, their pleasures and oftentimes, it must be confessed, their follies, are always before us; and, reading between the lines, a perfect picture of life at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century is built up. And particularly interesting are the topographical references to Pressmen and others, whose lot it is to spend the greater part of their lives in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street and the Temple. Mr. Lucas laments the fact that Charles Lamb's memory has been treated shabbily by posterity, for there. is only one public memorial to him, and that is "The joint tablet to Cowper, Keats, and Lamb himself in Edmonton churchyard." Yet, so long as the Temple stands, we venture to think that Elia will need no other monument, for it was here that he was born, at No. 2, Crown Office Row, and "The iron gates, dated 1730, leading to the garden opposite, are the same through which the curious, thoughtful boy must often have peered or wandered." But if the Temple has not altered greatly, Fleet Street and the Strand, we fear, would hardly be recognisable by Charles Lamb, could he now see them. On another page we reproduce an illustration showing St. Dunstan's Church and that portion of Fleet Street, as it then was, with Temple Bar (now a time-honoured relic in a private park) still standing. It will be noted that "The Street," as it is familiarly called, was wider at that spot than now, for houses have been built out to its level in the roadway since then, almost closing in the church, in which, in former days, Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, and From "The Guide to Fairyland," by Dion him. After a visit to the Lake District, he wrote: After all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than among Skiddaw. Still I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness. After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year-two, three years, among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know. If you have not read Lucas's Lamb, do so at once, as you are missing something. In Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop's Guide to Fairyland one does not know which to admire most-the witty quaintness of Mr. Calthrop's writing, or the laughter-compelling drawings with which the book is plentifully interspersed. Both achieve their object, for after reading two three pages, and after dwelling for a few moments upon the delightful drawing of the paper - boat in which the journey to Fairyland is made, the elderly reader rubs his eyes to find out whether he's awake, and then proceeds to curse himself for being so childish as to believe in it all. It is said of most books that they contain, somewhere or other, some portrait of the author, though in few is this so ingenuously evident as in the Guide to Fairyland, where, 'neath the frowning delineaments of "The witch herself," on page 125, we seem to see the cheerful face of the author as we know him in real life. However, we may be mistaken, and perhaps Mr. Calthrop will not thank us for pointing this out It seems a poor way of showing our gra.itude for a delightful book. We have been the journey to Fairyland, and words fail to express our admiration for what, in very truth, might be called this "Baby's Baedeker." There are many things in it that children will not understand that is, children of tender years-yet elderly children, say, of from thirty to forty years of age, will linger over it all, and will reconstruct "shadowy recollections" in a manner that was impossible before the advent of this guide. We have been with Captain Bullfinch to The Town, and have met The Princess, The Miller's Third Son, The Dwarf, The Witch, The Good Aunt, The Giant, and The Enchantress, and have come back feeling the fresher in our ideas after this intellectual holiday. A striking contrast is afforded between ancient and modern fables in two books which we have just read together: Gesta Romanorum (Routledge: 6s. net) and Wood Myth and Fable, by Ernest Thompson Seton (Hodder and Stoughton: 55. net). The interest of the first appeals chiefly to students of literature, for it consists of a series of "entertaining moral tales invented by the monks as a fireside recreation, and commonly applied in their discourses from the pulpit, whence the most celebrated of our own poets and others have extracted their plots." As a quarry for authors to hunt up "skeletons," the Gesta Romanorum has had no rival, for such writers as Boccaccio and Chaucer and others down to Schiller and Rosetti have all drawn material from its pages. But Wood Myth and Fable is new, and speaks to us of our times, or rather, being American in its authorship, of a few years hence. Morals are drawn from the series of up-to-date fables given, and the morals GOSSIP ABOUT Two Indian Novels AND BOOKS THEIR MAKERS Some little time ago I had occasion to comment upon the increasing number of novels whose action takes place "East of Suez." The East is still a-calling to some purpose, for two of the most recent arrivals on my table are tales of Indian life, and both excellent stories to boot. Beyond the fact that "The Waters of Destruction," by Mrs. Alice Perrin, and "Dilys," by Mrs. F. E. Penny, are the work of ladies familiar with AngloIndian life, and both distinctly gifted in the art of story-telling, they have little in common. There Fleet Street, showing St. Dunstan's Church as it was when (Reproduced by kind permission of Me huen and Co., publishers are as funny as those in the Gesta Romanorum, though for a different reason. Here are a few culled at random :-"A good substitute for wisdom has not yet been discovered"; "Any fool can improve on creation"; "The prize is always at the end of the trail"; "Splitting rails will not make an Abraham Lincoln." All of which will be conceded, as will the truth of the following verse, which we cannot help quoting, and with which we take leave of Mr. Seton's entertaining book, which, by the way, is illustrated with another series of his little "thumbnail :) drawings: When appetite and food are given, G. F. J. is a stronger note of passion in the writing of Mrs. Perrin than in that of Mrs. Penny, and the verve with which she tells her story helps to carry it off in a way that Mrs. Penny does not aim at, the latter being, in her style, and perhaps in her personality also, a little more reserved. Both of these novels, however, ought to have some considerable success, and I have no hesitation in recommending them to my readers. "The Waters of Destruction" is, in plot at least, by no means unusual, and might be described as the typical problem novel of AngloIndian life, involving, as it does, the old question of the difficulties that must inevitably arise when the English official mates with a native wife. Mrs. Perrin, however, treats this subject with great ability, and with none of that morbidness with which it is associated case in respect to "A World Without a Child," which I have just been reading with keen appreciation. It is even better than "The Face Beyond the Door," which, when I read it, I hardly hoped him to improve upon. The imaginative scheme of the little work is boldness itself, and only in the hands of one who is a consummate artist in words could it have been justified. We are to conceive a state of society in which, through womenkind shrinking from the burden of motherhood, all things become degraded, and the punishment meted out from on high is, that no more children shall be born. In the most masterly manner does the author depict for us the awfulness of a social state in which there is nothing but decay and no new birth. At last, through prayer and Divine compassion, comes regeneration, and we are left with the dreamer seeing a vision of a bright future heralded by the promise of a little child. While Mr. Kernahan's art is essentially didactic, it is art none the less, and the little book, genuinely poetic in conception, is written in beautifully polished and living prose. It ought to have a sale out of all proportion to its size. Mr. Louis Becke leading Colonial novelists, whose My South Sea Log" has just been issued for his latest story, "Lady Jim of Curzon Street" (Werner Laurie: 6s.), is an excellent study of that phase of modern life which is so obvious to those who can but look a little below the surfacethe deadening effects of frivolity on the devotees of Fashion. Although in no sense "preachy," Mr. Hume's novel is one that "gives us to think," and he has succeeded in combining a very interesting story with an amount of accurate character delineation which may be something of a surprise to those who only look to him for novels à la "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," with which, a good many years back, he leapt into fame. The Art of Allegory The art of writing allegory is one of the most ancient, as it is one of the most difficult, forms of literature to render popular. It has few exponents in these matterof-fact days. It is a little field of letters in which Mr. Coulson Kernahan stands almost alone. At one time it looked as if Mrs. Olive Schreiner might have been expected to become a popular writer of this kind of imaginative fiction; but she has disappointed us in many ways. Kernahan, however, goes on from one success to another, and each new booklet of his seems to be so great an advance on its predecessor that it is difficult to imagine his improving upon it. Certainly, this is the Mr. Mrs. Alice Perrin A clever author of Indian stories, of which "The Waters of Destruction" is specially recommended adventurous years when he sailed the South Seas as a supercargo are quite as vivid as his fiction, and have the added interest of actuality. Nothing that Mr. Becke has written is lacking in the touch of a strong and original personality, and some of his shorter stories, such as "Rodman, the BoatSteerer," and those in "By Reef and Palm," are bound to take a high place in the literature of the South Seas. It would be altogether finnicking criticism to point out that Mr. Becke is none too careful in certain points of grammar, when he can give us so copiously of the red things of life. J.A. H. The Cream of Fox-hunting BY OUR HUNTING CORRESPONDENT The Shires comes One occasionally across the Provincial hunting man who, well satisfied with the sport his own hounds provide and unable himsel to spend even a part of the season in Leicestershire, is apt to pooh-pooh the virtues of the Shires as a hunt ng paradise. "Don't talk to me o your crack packs, and your Thatchers, and your seas of grass," he will tell you complacently, "you ought to have been in that hour and a half with the Blankshire last month. That was quite good enough for me." One can hardly refrain from admiring his unswerving loyalty to the local pack, and hunting would certainly be in a bad way if everyone wanted to crowd into the Shires. But it has been well said that everyone who counts himself a hunting enthusiast ought to at least one season to aspire Cottesmore Hounds going to covert Here, Leicestershire. indeed, we get "the cream of fox-hunting." The abundance of grass although it is a mistake to suppose that you have nothing but a carpet of turf to ride over in the Shiresseems to hold a stronger scent than other countries, and hounds, the finest that can be bred, are accordingly enabled to get over the ground quicker than less fortunate packs in the Provinces. The fields are big, and the fences wide apart and wonderfully varied, and if you want to see the best of the fun in Leicestershire, your horse must be the best that you can buy. The longer pedigree he has the more likely he is to carry you to the front. Hunting from Melton, you get the "cream with a variety of packs-with the Belvoir, the Quorn, the Cottesmore, in and Mr. Fernie's. |