4 SEPTEMBER 1926, Page 22

COLLECTANEA

THE Bodley Head, for six shillings, gives us a reprint of the curious sixteenth-century poetical collection of love-poems entitled Willobie His Avisa, which puipoits to be "for the incouraging and helping of maides and idues to holde an honest and conastnt course against all vnhonest and lewd temptations," but which in reality seems to veil a covert attack on certain great men of the time who are hidden under the anonymity of initials. One W. S., for instance (who, the Editor thinks, may be Shakespeare) is described as "a miserable comforter comforting his friend with an impossibilitie." Mr. G. S. Harrison adds to the book a critical essay which helps towards the understanding of some of its very cryptic allusions. * * '• Miss Katherine Buck's London in the Fourth Century (Mayhew, 3s.) is a long narrative poem, full of antiquarian learning, which purports to give a contemporary account of the coronation of the Emperor Maximus in 388. The picture of Roman London, to which the author is largely indebted to Major Gordon Home, is striking and alive. -* * * Old London—fifteenth-century London—receives some further description and illustration from Mr. Leonard Summer's Clifford's Inn (Folk Press, is.), and for the same price the same author and publishing house furnish a study of The Homes of George Eliot, to which is added "An appreciative commentary on her characteristics and philosophy "—surely by this time zrieux fru I