Breadandbutterflies. By Dion Clayton Calthrop. (Mills and Boon. 6s.)—It happens
occasionally that a reviewer receives a book which almost anyone could review better than he himself, and for this reason, that he is driven to read it at a sitting, to formulate his criticism now and at no other time ; whereas certain books, and among them Breadandbutterflies, are obviously intended to be taken up in spare moments here and there. To read Mr. Calthrop's little prose poems from cover to cover would be to pick out all the currants of a pudding and make one's meal of them alone, or, as the title suggests, to spend a working day in watching butterflies. They are most light and fanciful, charming to certain moods, repulsive to others, possessed of some subtlety which is killed by analysis. Their danger is affectation, their fault monotony, although now and then their author stabs us with a bit of fine satire, whether on modem education, as in the "Small Boy who Thought He was a Cynic," or, in " The Last Cigarette," on the profits of war. But the same quality of elfin sharpness runs through all the book. Mr. Calthrop works with a scalpel, never with a bludgeon.
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