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The Pageant of English Prose. Edited by R. M. Leonard.

(Oxford University Press. 3s. 43d.)—Five hundred passages by three hundred and twenty-five authors are contained in these pages. Mr. Leonard has therefore collected not the best but the most characteristic passages of English prose, and his collection thus loses much of its intrinsic value. Many of the passages by the less famous writers are, to say the least of it, dull, and we cannot help regretting that the principle of "one writer, one passage" has not been broken more often than it has. The preface is notable for the extraordinary statement that Sterne has "no literary style at all, or at best it is bad." What, we wonder, can be Mr. Leonard's definition of " literary style"?

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