When an artist, who is also a writer with a
strong feeling for words and phrase and a very delightful touch, sets about recording a holiday, the result can hardly fail to be pleasant, and Mr. Roger Fry's A Sampler of Castile is an extremely pleasant book. In the opening paragraph of his introduction Mr. Fry not only describes the manner in which the book was written but also gives at once a delightful foretaste of its style :-
" This book makes no pretensions except one, namely—that it was not written for you, my reader, but solely for myself. It was written so that I might let some of all those variegated, vivid and odd impressions run themselves clear on to .paper before they became part of the vague mist of blurred images which move like ghosts in the dim world of the past. It has been botched together from scraps written at odd moments in halls of hotels when dinner lingered, in waiting-rooms, in trains and even trains ; whenever or wherever, in short, the chance of crystallizing some of these haunting images in words presented itself to a capricious and unmethodical mind."
And so we get a series of pleasantly rambling essays on the Spanish language, Spanish art, on visits to Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Ciudad Rodrigo, Toro, and other towns and villages. The sixteen drawings at the end of the book make a charming supplement to the writing, but, curious to say, Mr. Fry the writer, in our opinion, shows himself in this book superior to Mr. Fry the artist. The book, as a produc- tion, does great credit to the Hogarth Press.
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