4 JULY 1914, Page 34

Essays. By Alice Meynell. (Burns and Oates. 5s. net.)— George

Meredith once said of Mrs. Meynell's essays that Matthew Arnold would have acknowledged that she could write and Carlyle that she could think—and he selected good judges. A delicate and austere distinction is visible alike in her thought and her language. She has written too little : this "collected edition" of her prose contains less than three hundred pages, even though three or four new—and very charming—studies of famous women are added to what we prized already in out-of-print booklets. But we find some compensation for the small bulk of her work in the fact that every essay is worth reading several times over.