26 NOVEMBER 1921, Page 25

GIFT - BOOKS.

ILLUSTRATED BOOKS AND REPRINTS.

j.traszEsn court life in the eleventh century is attractively described in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shipley Omari and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell, and illustrations, some of them in colour, from prints. (Constable. 21e. net.) It is instructive to notice that, while Western Europe was in a state of turmoil, Japan was enjoying peace under an elaborately ordered social system. The diarists fecord the affairs of the court as minutely as Fanny Burney described the court of George III., but with far more decorum. They were very human, too, with their little affairs of the heart and their love of poetry, of nature and of pretty dresses. At a court function eight ladies " tied their hair with white cords " to serve the Queen's dinner, and the other maids of honour who were left out " wept bitterly—it was shocking to see them." Miss Lowell's introductory essay is useful, and the verses scattered through the diaries are often charming.

Dogs of China and Japan in Nature and in Art, by Mr. V. W. F. Collier (Heinemann, 42s. net), is a handsome and scholarly book, very fully illustrated from Chinese pictures, sculpture and porcelain. The Chinese eat dogs, but have nevertheless always kept them as pets and for use in sport. Hounds occur on reliefs that are perhaps earlier than the Christian era. The chow has long been the companion of the fowler. The author discusses at length the evolution of the Pekingese, the lion-dog from Tibet, and the pug, and regards it as probable that the King Charles spaniel came from the Far East with the other curiosities im- ported by the Portuguese and the Dutch into sixteenth-century Europe. In The Sport of Our Ancestors (Constable, 21s. net) Lord Willoughby de Broke has selected some capital fox-hunting scenes from the prose writings of Whyte-Melville, Beckford, " Nimrod " and Trollope, and from the verse of Egerton War- burton and Bromley-Davenport, and written sonic introductory pages for each of them, with a chapter on Surtees. It is an entertaining volume and the drawings by Mr. G. D. Armour are excellent.—Sport in Wildest Britain, by H. Hcsketh Prichard (Heinemann, 25a. net), will interest both the naturalist and the sportsman. The chapters on capercailzic, black geese and grey

geese, Causamuth ducks and ptarmigan, and on the unprotected common seal are admirably written. The author recalls an experience with some Irish boatmen who demanded ten shillings for skinning four seals. Afterwards ho found that they had sublet the job to others whose price was five shillings ; they in turn sublet it to two youths at a shilling at,iece, and the youths got two old women to finish the work for threepence each. The twelve exquisite coloured drawings of birds which illustrate the book were the work of the late Dr. E. A. Wilson, who perished with Captain Scott in the Antarctic.--- Wild Life in the Tree Tops, by Captain C. W. R. Knight (Thornton Butterworth, 21s. net), is a fascinating book, in which a patient photographer describes the birds which he watched for hours in order to secure the won- derful pictures reproduced in his pages. His accounts of buzzards, hawks and crows, and of " the home life of a heron," are pro- foundly interesting. He confirms, from his own experience in the firing-line, the belief that the birds in France took no notice of shell-fire. At St. Eloi a golden oriole sang on a tree in No Man's Land, though the wood was shelled daily by the enemy.