19 SEPTEMBER 1925, Page 28

Miles Kitson. By Claude E. Benson. (Sampson Low. 7s. 6d.

net.)—The Border, the Solway and the Fells provide the mice en scene for this seventeenth-century story, while Covenanters, smugglers, a Scottish officer, and Miles Ritson himself, who appears to be a sort of yeoman farmer, are the dramatis personae. It may be doubted whether the officer would really have interlarded his conversation with so many Shakespearean tags. Yet it is curious to observe that these scattered phrases have a strong flavour of modernity in the midst of Mr. Benson's seventeenth-century prose.