SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Under this heading we notice such Books of the week as have not been reserved for review in other forms.]
De Libris: Prose and Verse. By Austin Dobson. (Macmillan and Co. 5s. net.)—The essays, reviews, and poems have, we suppose, appeared before. Readers who have seen them already will, we are sure, be glad to see them again; to others they will be a still greater delight. Mr. Austin Dobson never goes anywhere near exhausting his welcome. His comings are only too rare. The most delightful papers in the volume are the appreciations of "Two Modern Book Illustrators," Miss Kate Greenaway and Mr. Hugh Thomson, charmingly written and most appropriately illustrated. After describing " Stothard Land" and the "Land of Caldecott," he goes on to tell us of " Greenaway Land" :—" There is a third country, a country inhabited almost exclusively by the sweetest little child-figures that have ever been invented, in the quaintest and prettiest costumes, always happy, always gravely playful—and nearly always playing ; always set in the most attractive framework of flower-knots, or blossoming orchards, or red-roofed cottages with dormer windows. Everywhere there are green fields, and daisies and daffodils, and pearly skies of spring, in which a kite is often flying. No children are quite like the dwellers in this land ; they are so gentle, so unaffected in their affectation, so easily pleased, so trustful and so confiding." How felicitous is the phrase italicised!
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