28 DECEMBER 1907, Page 25

The Red Cap. By Edward Sydney Tylee. (Nelson and Sons.

5s.)—Mr. Tylee gives us here a very vigorous picture of the Revolution in France. Philip Aston, a lad of fourteen, of partly French descent, comes to Havre, on his way to Paris, where he is to be apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. Chance brings him across a young noble with popular sympathies. Gaston de St. Hubert, the aristocrat, and Hippolyte Lemoine, the bourgeois, with his family, make up the chief 'characters of the drama. The tale is not, perhaps, as artistically contrived as it might have been; there is not the sequence of incidents which belongs to the highest narrative art; but it is a good piece of work. The horrors of the time are discreetly kept in the background. Lemoine, for instance, comes home dismayed with the sight of the September massacres; he acts as a "messenger," but we do not see them. It is as good, as wholesome, and as instructive a boy's book as one could desire to see.