17 JANUARY 1920, Page 23

The Dial of Princes. By Don Anthony of Guevara. (Philip

Allan. 10s. 6d. net.)—It was a pleasant idea to begin a new " Scholar's Library " with this scholarly edition, by Mr. K. N. Colvile, of select passages from a famous sixteenth-century Spaniard, in the version of Sir Thomas North. Undergraduates have long been taught on German authority that Guevara was the model which John Lyly followed in Euphues. The reader of this volume may see for himself, as well asi 1 the editor's Preface, that Lyly cannot have done so. The rhetorical moralizing of the good Bishop and his tricks of style were, as the lawyers say, common form in the Tudor ago. Lyly elaborated with unusual care the artifices which his generation loved. The Dial is, In form, a rambling commentary on the life and writings of Marcus Aurelius. What the Bishop said is of no great import- ance, but it is delightful to dip into the volume for the sake of North's dignified and mellifluous prose—the prose of the Authorized Version.