We are still getting Bernard Shaw's last words. The very
last work, so it is said, that he prepared for print comes all too appositely for use as an ideal substitute for a Christmas card. I say all too appositely, because, having realised that my own annual Christ- mas-card crisis is solved at a stroke, I am driven to the annoying conclusion that everyone else will solve the crisis in the same way, and that' the select company to whom I propose to send copies of Bernard Shaw's Rhyming Picture Guide will each of them get about a dozen copies from other benefactors. Well, I can only hope that mine will get there first. For the combination of Shaw's own snapshots of his Hertfordshire village and his verses on his Hertfordshire village is altogether charming. A hypercritical cur- mudgeon might observe that to make " welfare " thyme with "dwell there" strains euphony a little, but! trust I am neither the adjective nor the noun. However that may be, let me urge every reader of these lines as insistently as I know how NOT to send the Rhyming Picture Guide as a Christmas card. If there were any justice in the world all copies except the ones I have ordered for myself would be suppressed till Boxing Day. Perhaps the Leagrave Press, Luton, will see to that.
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