23 FEBRUARY 1924, Page 19

BOOKS.

THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.

Faom the books published this week about a dozen and a- half seem to emerge from the common average. Under the heading of art, there is a delightful " Living Painters " volume devoted to reproductions of the work of Duncan Grant (The Hogarth Press) with a brief introduction by Mr Roger Fry. Similar books are the two latest volumes of Contemporary British Artists, Ambrose McEvoy and Charles Shannon (Berm) ; and, fourthly, Stained Glass Tours in Spain and Flanders, by Charles Hitchcock Sherrill (Bodley Head), is an attractively produced book with an attractive subject. Two bibliographical works come from Messrs. Dulau, The Library of Edmund Gosse, compiled by E. H. M. Cox, and Seven XVIIIth Century Bibliographies, by Iolo A. Williams, which includes Armstrong, Akenside, Collins, Churchill, Goldsmith, Shenstone and Sheridan. Burma, by Sir J. G. Scott (Fisher Unwin), is a study by one who is an authority on that little known country. There should be much that is interesting in The East India House (Bodley Head), a history of that establishment by Mr. William Foster, who has been in charge of the India Office records for sixteen years. It will be remembered that past members of the establishment include James and John Stuart Mill, Peacock, and Lamb.

Two books of verse are worthy of attention, Kensington Gardens, by Humbert Wolfe (Benn), and Poems and Sonnets, by Frank Kendon (Lane). An interesting translation is the play called Gas, by Georg Kaiser (Chapman and Dodd), which was performed in English last November at Birming- ham. From the same publisher comes The Letters of Madame, a first instalment of the translated letters of Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans, a great lady of the Court of Louis XIV. The translator is Gertrude Scott Stevenson. From America come two books of interest, An Outline of the British Labor Movement, by Paul Blanshard (Doran), and Criticism in America : Its Function and Status (Harcourt, Brace and Co.), a series of Essays by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. H. L. Mencken and others. Our Second American Adventure (Hodder and Stoughton) is the third volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's travels in his capacity of Spiritualist. Another volume of the complete Hudson, Afoot in England, comes from Messrs. Dent, and the latest of the Broadway Translations (Routledge) is Theocritus, Dion and Moschus executed, in verse, by Mr. J. H. Hallard.

Assyrian Medical Texts from the Originals in the British Museum, by R. Campbell Thompson (Oxford University Press), is a series of reproductions of cuneiform texts with an introduction. Such a work will appeal, of course, to a few individuals only. The majority will take refuge in Eating Without Tears, by G. F. Scotson-Clark (Cape). It is, the Preface informs us, neither a cookery-book nor a manual of dietetics ; but it is certainly a treatise on " good things " and undeniably contains a large number of recipes for their