BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
COUNT LEON ToLsroi comes forward with an attempt to show the peace and placidity of Tolstoi's family life. " Tur- geniev," he states, " spoke with envy of Tolstoi's ' good luck.' That good fortune was exemplified, above all, in his wife, my mother, the Countess Sophie Tolstoi." The Truth About My Father (Murray) is a pious book, and Count Leon Tolstoi, as a good and simple-hearted son, could hardly have been expected to write without bias. But the value of the book ran be gauged by another quotation from the preface Let me say frankly that it will not be possible, merely by documents alone, to persuade me to accept opinions that are contrary to my own. Apart from all documents, there exist in my heart and in my reason data that are much more certain and much more -bile than even the ` Letters ' and the ' Journal ' of Tolstoi himself." The Broadway Translations (Routledge) now include a version by Mr. M. C. Beverley of Aksakov's Chronicles of a Russian Family.
In The Price of Freedom (Scribner's) Mr. Coolidge publishes thirty papers, messages, and addresses on American ideals and American great men. It will be interesting to compare the President's style and sentiments with those of President Harding, who always roused more indignant opposition to his English than to any of his political acts. Two interesting volumes of legal reminiscences and anecdotes appear this week, Seventy- Two Years at the Bar, by Ernest Bowen-Rowlands (Macmillan), and The Drama of the Law, by Judge Parry (T. Fisher Unwin). A Man—Finished, by Giovanni Papini (Hodder and Stoughton), is a translation from a subjective autobiography first published in Italy twelve years ago. From Messrs. Heinemann we have received Benjamin Constant, by Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn, an erudite study of a fascinating man.
Two important volumes of poems reach us together, Mr. W. H. Davies's Secrets and Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Harp-Weaver. Mr. Davies's volume is thin but welcome. Miss Millay's is twice as long and its appearance raises hopes for her that have never yet been quite satisfied.
TuE LITERARY EDITOR.
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