THosE, and they were many, who found pleasure in that
unusual book The Confes- sions of an Un-common Attorney, will no doubt welcome this posthumous volume of essays and papers from the same hand, with a short memoir of the author by Richenda Scott. Reginald Hine was the best type of local historian, illustrating by reference to the history of his native county, and par- ticularly that part of it round Baldock, where he was born, and Hitchin, where he lived, the changing trends in the national life, cen- tury by century. But local history needs to be treated in a special way, and with a much wider than local outlook, if it is to appeal to the general reader, for whom this volume is presumably intended ; and it is by no means certain that Mr. Hine would himself have made the selection that has been made on his behalf. The first paper, for example, " The Portrait Of an English Squire," based on an old household account-book picked up at Sotheby's, is unduly drawn out ; details that interest up to about the twentieth page pall long before the 37th is reached. The second, on the other hand, " Records of a Country Firm "—Hine's own firm of soli- citors, tracing an unbroken history from the later years of Queen Elizabeth—is charged with interest and historical value throughout. The same can be said of other chapters, but the decision to include everything irr -the author's writings that seemed worthy of per- petuation has resulted in a heterogeneity that deprives the volume of the character the Confessions possessed. Even so there is much to attract the type of reader to whom the simple details of human life appeal.
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