29 JANUARY 1937, Page 36

STORM AND PEACE By John Beresford Tranquillity, to Mr. Beresford,

is a word of power ; to repeat it is to induce the mood which he finds in

English village churches, quiet in the sun, in the lovely valley of the Dove, in contemplating the long series of his ancestors, in the writings of Izaak Walton,' Charles Cotton, and his beloved

Parson Woodeford. These essays (Cobden-Sanderson, 8s. 6d.) are nearly all in search of time past and the peace that settles like dust on ancient things. He engraves for us in his pleasant style the churches of Norbury and Throcking. He takes us with a Geiman Pastor through England in the summer of 1782. He writes about the eighteenth-century diarists with sympathy, and resurrects Gray's hated Parson Etough. There are two long essays which- provide the " Storm." The one on the rebellion of 1745 (here called " Criiis ") contains hitherto unpublished letters of Pelham and the rest of the Government, but is rather too matter-of-fact and undramatic. The essay on General Gordon gives a startling glimpSe of this astonishing man. But the keynote of the book is in the final essay On " Tranquillity:"