The Life of Saint Mary Magdalen. Translated from the Italian
of an unknown fourteenth-century writer by Valentina Hawtrey. With an Introduction by Vernon Lee. (John Lane. 5s. net.)—We agree with "Vernon Lee" that Miss Hawtrey has admirably exe- cuted her task, producing a book that can rank with any translation we ever saw for its purpose of placing in the hands of modern readers "one of the absolutely satisfactory works, so few but so exquisite, of the Middle Ages." The volume contains fourteen half-tone blocks, reproductions of the principal Magdalena of the painters, of which the one that most befits our heroine is that of Bellini at Venice. The story is told with a naïve and exquisite grace that the translator has happily seized. "I think," he says as he pictures his characters, and when he "thinks" it is ever as the early Florentines painted. . We congratulate Miss Paget also upon the success with which her suggestion, in "Studies of the Renascence," has been followed by Miss Hawtrey.
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