SIR,—" Tastes in reading," as Mr. Callendar has noted, do
"notoriously differ." But many of your readers must, I fancy, have felt as astonished as I did to read his further statement, for it not even a question ; "who but a boy or young man with no experience of life could find Jane Austen's insipid drawing-room romances entertaining."
Mr. Callendar can never have read Kipling on Jane, "blessed be her shade " ; but that Kipling was not entirely imagining her popularity, among the experienced fighting men of the last year, I can vouch from personal knowledge of one at least—a Major in the Gunners—who wrote home for all Jane Austen's novels as they were the only books he could "be bothered" to read in his dug-out. I can assure Mr. Callendar that this reader was neither very young nor inexperienced!—Yours faith-
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