Recent Reprints
THE one-volume edition of The Torrington Diaries (Eyre & Spottir woode, 30s.), abridged by Fanny Andrews, and introduced bY Arthur Bryant, is a most welcome reprint. Early in the 1930s, a number of MS volumes by John Byng (eventually Lord Torrington) were located by C. Bruyn Andrews and edited into five volumes that appeared between 1934 and 1938; the war prevented further editions, and the death of the editor delayed the desirable shortened version until the present admirable and compact book. It contains a seta' tion of twelve of John Byng's tours and rides into the English and Welsh countryside between 1781 and 1794, and reveals him as 8 lively, idiosyncratic traveller in what seemed an ominous period uf history. Industry, if not the example of French anarchy, was unmistakably changing the face of rural England and the tempo of its life, a change that was not to Byng's taste. The inflictions M suffered ranged from landscape gardeners, turnpike roads, tha decadence of Bond Street and Brighton, to the miseries of countrY alehouses, bad food and hard beds. But Byng had the instincts uf a Romantic, and he rummaged about the country cheerfully fur relics and antiquities and in search of the picturesque. A tinge uf nostalgia colours his writings as, even at a time when there were still morris-dancers and peasants, he hankers after the untainted rusticitY of Herrick's day, and for "civility, honesty and good cheer." Dr. Walter Starkie's translation of Don Quixote of La Mancha (Macmillan, 21s.) with a very considerable biographical preludal and decorations from Dore, is an attractive version of Cervantes epic novel; by omitting the lengthy digressions and a great deal of the somewhat callous horseplay, the book is reduced to a convenient readable length. French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth CenturY (Turnstile Press, 21s.) by Kingsley Martin, has been revised by J. 1), Mayer; a short bibliography has been added to this valuable surrr mary of political thought betwiaen Bayle and Condorcet. C. 11. Vulliamy's John Wesley (tpworth Press, 18s.) has been reissued after twenty-two years ; a felicitous biography that is one of the beat introductions to Methodism and Wesley's eighteenth-century milielk There are new editions of two oriental anthologies: The Wisclolt of China and The Wisdom of India (Michael Joseph, each 18s.), both of them compiled and annotated by Lin Yutang. They are generoM storehouses of religious and philosophical writing, of fables, hurnouri poetry, and proverbial and epigrammatic wisdom. Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch (Penguin Books, 2s, 6d.) was tha author's first published work, and is a perceptive chapter of auto' biography, telling with great sensitivity, and without pretence of hesitation, of an adolescence, half spent in running away front Repton, and half in discovering China. It would need the genius of a Grandville to match George Orwell't characterisation, but the artist John Halas and Joy Batchelor have made a good job of the illustrated edition of Animal Farm: A Fair, Story (Seeker & Warburg, 10s. 6d.). After the nine years that have made it a permanent addition to the literature of English satire+ Animal Farm should, in any case, be read and digested in aid available form.
PAUL DINNAO
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