• Shorter Notices
West country Stories. By A. L. Rowse. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.) AcTuALLY only one-third of these reprinted pieces, seven out of twenty-one, are stories ; the remainder are essays or light (not to say, in some cases, slight) sketches, together with the draft of a broadcast commemorating the quincentenary of the grant of a Charter to Plymouth. This ranks high among the contents of the book, and in view of the spectacle Plymouth has presented since 1940 (the broad- cast was written at the end of 1939) there is a certain poignancy in the reference to the now silenced bells of St. Andrew's and the streets that the great Plymothians of the past "would still recog- nise if they were to visit them by the glimpse of the moon "; it is a fine commemoration of a great city. Mr. Rowse is at his best in an elegiac note, as witness his tributes to a Cornish clay-worker and to that distinguished Oxonian authority on all things Cornish, Charles Henderson. But he himself is so wrapped up in Cornwall that he perhaps hardly realises that in his readers he has to create an interest in the county, not assume it. His essay on the Duchy will appeal only to those whom strings of fact delight ; that on Kilvert in Cornwall is hardly more than another string—this time of quotations from the famous diary ; and the story of how Mr. Rowse travelled to Cornwall in a sleeper is really too trivial for inclusion. But those who like the supernatural will appreciate the five stories with which the book begins, and those who like any kind of story at all will delight in the record of "How Dick Stephens Fought the Bear."
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