GIFT - BOOKS.
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS.
MB. ARTHUR T. Bourox has greatly enlarged and improved, in a, new edition, Miss Evelyn March Philippe's well-known book on The Gardena of Italy (Country Life, £3 3s. net), which is now a most sumptuous and fascinating volume. The editor has added new chapters on the villas and gardens of Venetia, the Lakes, and Genoa, as well as an Introduction and architectural notes. But the text is subordinate to the photographic illus- trations, which are numerous and excellent. In these grey December days it is delightful to be transported to the noble gardens of Frascati and Tivoli, Rome, Florence, and Fiesole, Where the sun shines on the monumental works of bygone princes who, for all their luxury and extravagance, must have had a genuine love of Nature. The architects of their imposing villas took full advantage of the ground so that their patrons, as at Tivoli, had the best views of the scenery, and the tourist public has fallen heir to these privileges. To lovers of
Renaissance architecture, even more than to lovers of the formal garden, this fascinating book will appeal.
We can heartily commend to naturalists old and young Dr. Francis Ward's Animal Life under Water (Cassell, 7s. 8d. net), which deals mainly with otters and seals, diving birds, herons, gulls and kingfishers, and also treats of fish as seen from a special observation tank set in the bank of a stream. Dr. Ward is a charming writer as well as a skilled observer, and his book is illustrated with many excellent photographs. His accounts of a young otter in captivity and of the kingfishers that he saw near the coast before Gaza in 1917, and his remarks on gulls as the fisherman's enemies, may be noted as examples of the interesting things to be found in this book.
Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale's Golden Book of Famous Women (Hodder and Stoughton, 20s. net) is an anthology of prose and verse, with sixteen elaborate drawings reproduced in colours. The artist has chosen her famous women from fiction as well as from history, and may fairly plead that Guinevere and Olivia and Fair Rosamond are at last as real to us as Abelard's Eloise or Petrarch's Laura or even Joan of Arc. Her pictures of such heroines as these are interesting and attractive. The anthology includes many pleasant pages ranging from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Tennyson and George Eliot. Becky Sharp and Mrs. Gamp are included, by the way ; but are they not notorious rather than famous ?
As a Christmas present for the golfer we can praise Songs of the Links, by Robert K. Risk, illustrated by H. M. Bateman (Duckworth, 5s. net). Mr. Risk's clever verses, neatly parody- ing major and minor poets, are well matched by Mr. Bateman's comical drawings, in which the golfer's failings are mercilessly satirized. " The Golf Widows " is one of the beat pieces, with its moral :— " A really patient wife will grow a-weary Of talk about a concentrated cleek."
Mr. Bateman shows her in two views—fast asleep, while her husband, fresh from a good round, discourses of the qualities of a fantastic cleek with a twisted neck ; and weeping while the man stalks about the room in a fury because he is off his game. The symptoms will be familiar to golfers. " Mud " is an ode which suburban players will appreciate just now. Mr. Risk in another poem enlarges on the report that the late Amir was a keen golfer and was buried on his favourite course :— " But now his glad ghost jinks, Cheerful and gay, By night and day, From hole to hole upon his own loved links "- with the final assurance in a recondite pun that " there are always spirits at your Nineteenth Hole." Mr. Risk shows in his allusions a mastery of the technique of his subject. On the very first page the lines from a witty parody of FitzGerald-
" And many a Ball has found the Swiloan-bed And many a Man has played the sal Two-more "-
will be Greek to those who do not know the first hole on the old course at St. Andrews and the narrow watercourse that catches a bad drive. Every golfer who reads the book will be interested in supplying his own commentary.
Major Lorimer and his sister, Miss Lorimer, made admirable use of their leisure in Eastern Persia when they collected from the Kermani and Bakhtiari the Persian Tales now published in a handsome volume with clever coloured illustrations by Miss Hilda Roberts (Macmillan, 20s. net). These fairy-tales are of unequal merit, and their inconsequence and extravagance show that they have come straight from the lips of humble people. But their very defects, to our sophisticated taste, are merits. The polished adaptations of Eastern stories with which the Western world has been familiar for two centuries are tame compared with these grim or fantastio folk-tales. Any • re who is familiar with the Thousand and One Nights will observe that most of the stories can be traced to that marvellous collection ; but the variations are curious and
amueleg. One of the best. in the book is " The Story of the Fortune-Teller," an amateur who took to the profession because his wife envied the wife of the King's Chief Fortune-Teller,
and who achieved success by a series of happy accidents, in which our old friends the Forty Thieves became involved. " Baldhead and the Scanty Beards " is a comic version of the original of Hans Andersen's " Big Claus and Little Claus." We wish that the authors had given some account of the way in which they gathered these tales, which show that the story- teller still flourishes in Persia.
Mr. Donald Maxwell has not been happily inspired in the title of The Last Crusade (Lane, 25s. net) which he has chosen for an account of his tour as an official artist in Palestine last winter. The term " Crusade " does not apply to a war in which Moslem and Hindu as well as Christian soldiers fought, and beat, the Turk. Apart frem the title, the book is attractive. Mr. Maxwell's numerous sketches in colour or black-and-white are spirited and pleasing. As the fighting was over, he could go where he pleased, and he saw and sketched a great many interesting places and things. " British Drifters at Beirut " and " M.L. 248 Entering Tyre at Dawn " are pictures that typify this most romantic campaign. Mr. Maxwell's work was done for the Imperial War Museum.—All sportsmen and lovers of Nature will be glad to hear of the handsome new edition of Charles St. John's Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (Foulis, 30s. net), with coloured illustrations by those very competent animal painters, Mr. G. Denholm Armour and Mr. Edwin Alexander, and with an Introduction and notes by Sir Herbert Maxwell. St. John's book, which arose out of some Quarterly articles about 1840, retains all its interest because he was a close observer of birds and beasts and could describe dearly what he saw.—A new reprint of FitzGerald's .Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (same publishers, 10s. 6d. net)— from the first edition—is illustrated with coloured reproductions of Mr. Brangwyn's oil paintings. Many illustrators have tried their hands on the .Rubaiyat, but we are inclined to think that no one has expressed the spirit of the old Persian poet more faithfully than Mr. Brangwyn in these bold and fantastic impressions, which are not illustrations in the ordinary sense.
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