BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
THE " gloomy and terrible " Maturin is an excellent subject for biography : he was the last of those notable parson-
novelists who were so gravely out of place in their profession.
Ile had a hunger for fame and high-living ; he had a prolific imagination and not the slightest power of construction. In Melmoth he wrote the most impressive novel of the whole Gothic or German school of terror. Messrs. Constable have sent us an account of his life and works, Charles Robert Maturin, by Niilo Idman. Mr. Frederick Chamberlin has collected
with much research The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth (Bodley Head), giving authority for each quotation lest he " should
be designated the greatest liar of my time . . . . for nobody would ever believe that these thousands of pithy sayings had been lying about for three hundred years until I collected them, unless I proved it." In The Youngest Drama (Been) Mr. Ashley Dukes surveys fifty modern playwrights and sums them up with a well-balanced brevity. Mr. George Saintsbury publishes A Second Scrap Book (Macmillan), as original and diverse as his earlier book.
Small Talk at Wreyland (Cambrdge University Press) has expanded to a third volume, but Mr. Cecil Torr has not exhausted himself ; we should imagine, indeed, that the activity of his mind makes his fund of reminiscence and comment inexhaustible. We have received from Messrs. Gardner, Rare, Vanishing, and Lost Birds, compiled from notes by W. H. Hudson. Most of the birds he describes and Mr. H. Gronvold paints, have been annihilated in England by the ravages of collectors. It is distressing to know that once we had amongst us pelicans, ospreys, great auks, and bustards, and more distressing to realize that in all pro- bability many other species will soon be lost to us. Mr.
Edmund Blunden gives us Christ's Hospital, A Retrospect (Christophers). The series of Abbey Classics (Chapman and Dodd), which we have previously noted as unusually neat and pleasant to handle, has six new volumes and now includes the poems and plays of John Gay, the Satyricon of Petronius, the shorter poems of Prior, and twenty select' Colloquies of Erasmus.
Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches, November, 1914—August, 1923 (Dent), is the cumbrous but exact title of a book compiled by Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino. Mr. Bernard Miall has translated the autobio- graphy of Master Johann Dietz (Allen and Unwin), a seven-
teenth-century surgeon and barber. The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E. Fournier d' Albe, with a Foreword by Sir Oliver Lodge, is published by Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin.-
Mr. J. D. Beresford has collected several magazine stories into a new volume The Imperturbable Duchess (Collins). The Richest Man, by Edward Shanks (Collins), seems to be another carefully written and plotted melodrama. The main part of Mr. Richard Aldington's new volume of poems, Exile (Allen and Unwin) is in rhymed verse, and in verse of a quality which should silence all who believe that free verse is written only by those who are incompetent in rhyme.
THE LITERARY EDITOR.
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