For a great many people black-out evenings mean a good
deal more reading than usual, some of it cursory, some of it thought-out. There is something to be said for either method, but perhaps more for the latter. A little guidance is some= times useful, and perhaps some readers of this column might care to volunteer it (in the form of letters to the Editor, for space is lacking here). As an example of what I mean, you might start with that most excellent and too little known book, Queen Anne, by Herbert Paul, to be obtained in Dent's Way- farers' Library, and with that as groundwork go on to Leslie Stephen's Swift, and the same writer's Pope, and Courthope's Addison, and Minto's Defoe, all in the English Men of Letters series, continue with some of Swift himself, particularly the journal to Stella, some of Pope, some of Addison, throw in a novel or two on the period, like Esmond, and draw your impressions into a unity again with the chapters on Anne in G. M. Trevelyan's England Under the Stuarts—or better still, his great three-volume England Under Queen Anne. Scores of such short courses could, of course, be suggested.
JANUS.
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