23 APRIL 1942, Page 12

THE ARCHBISHOP'S NOVEL

SIR,—The title of the retiring Primate's novel, to which " Janus" alluded, is The Young Clanroy (not Glenroy): A RoMance of the '45 by the Rev. Cosmo Gordon Lang, late Fellow and Dean of Divinit Magdalen College, Oxford (Smith, Elder and Co., 1897). It is, as i authoi described it, " a simple and straightforward story of love an adventure," patently influenced by R. L. Stevenson with a touch Lorna Doone, but exhibiting considerable dramatic Dower and acquaintance with the Lockhart Papers. As explained in the Preface, was originally " told to a party of schoolboys in the dusk of summ evenings: I had little time to prepare the plot beforehand, and to hump the taste of the audience I was obliged to invent a striking episode every evening. The tale was written out afterwards very hurriedly, situp to serve for the next generation of the boys of the same school, cenaini not for publication. I have been—very reluctantly—persuaded to publi it . , ." It is remarkable less as an historical novel by a future Pr of the Church (cf. Newman's Callista, Wiseman's Fabiola), than as boys' adventure story by a don. Not all dons are so gifted or so h The dedication is in character: " To the boys to whom it was told, an who made the telling of it one of his happiest memories, this tale dedicated by their friend ' the Dean.'" There is a copy in the Cambrid University Library.—Yours truly, CHARLES Sawn. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.