BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS. INTEREirin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continues unabated. Messrs. Bell send us the completest transcript yet
published of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. But the Augustan age, the eighteenth century, hitherto almost a dark age to all but devoted students, is now, being continually explored in detail, and laid open to the general reader. The Medici Society publish a number of previously unprinted letters of Lord Chesterfield to Lord Huntingdon, with an introduction and notes by Mr. Francis Steuart. They were not written, it seems, with an eye to publication, but they are no less mannered, formal, and exquisite than his later compositions. Mr. Reginald Blunt has collected the letters that Mrs. Montague, "Queen of the Blues," exchanged with her friends, and has made with this material an excellent biography, published by Messrs. Constable, of the most notable English blue-stocking. The Journal of Horace Walpole's Printing Office at Strawberry Hill is edited, with great erudition, by Mr. Paget Toynbee, printed by the Chiswick Press, and published by Messrs. Constable.
Two poets collect their work in verse, Mr. John Drinkwater
(Sidgwick and Jackson) and Mr. Hilaire Belloc (Duckworth). Mr. Ford Madox Ford in Mr. Bosphorus and the Muses (Duck- worth) has written a very light-hearted, loose-jointed, wander- ing and witty poem on a hundred subjects, but mainly on modern poets. Come Hither (Constable) is a huge anthology, "for the young of all ages," selected by Mr. de la Mare.
Mr. Arnold Bennett has returned to his older manner of
steady and illuminating realism in Riceyman Steps (Cassell). Other novels of importance are Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley (Chatto and Windus), Told by an Idiot, by Rose Macaulay (Collins), A Triangle, by Maurice Baring (Heinemann), and The Parson's Progress, by Compton Mackenzie (Cassell). Mr. Chesterton publishes a book on St. Francis of Assisi (Hodder and Stoughton), and Mr. Laurence Housman four plays on Followers of St. Francis (Sidgwick and Jackson).
Two critics have collected their recent essays, Mr. James
Agate in Fantasies and Impromptus (Collins) and Mr. Robert Lynd in The Blue Lion (Methum). Mr. H. I'Anson Fausset deals with literature in a more solid and serious way, making a moral criticism of poetry. in Studies in Idealism (Dent). A new volume of essays by Henri Fabre, This Earth of Ours, comes from Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin.
Those who can afford to buy Japanese Colour Prints, by Laurence Binyon and J. J. O'Brien Sexton (Henn Bros.), are much to be envied. It is a beautiful volume, with forty-six plates and a full account of Japanese artists.
THE LITERARY EDITOR.
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