SHORTER NOTICES
Winters of Content and other Discursions. By Osbert Sitwell. (Duck worth. 2 t S.) THIS book is a welcome reissue of Sir Osbert's Winters of Content (first edition, 1932) together with Discursions (1925) and other pieces which have for their common theme the baronet's uncommon observations of Italian life and places. In a new preface Sir Osbert reveals his secret hope that the word discursions which he has invented for the sort of essay here reprinted will " one day appear . . . with my name as its authority in the august pages of the Oxford English Dictionary." The word is coined from discourse and discursive, and is meant to denote an essay " that unites in the stream of travel many very personal and random reflections and sentiments." The suggestion is a useful one, though lesser writers in the genre may be reluctant to appropriate a word which might at once invite comparison with Osbert Sitwell. There is a note in the preface also on Sir Osbert's critics, and a fair protest at reviewers' repeated references to his " chiselled baroque prose." Sir Osbert claims that his prose is, if anything, more gothic than baroque, and that in any case if it were baroque it would hardly be chiselled. It has been Sir Osbert's fate, in a niggardly and unsure age, first to be neglected then praised with silly clichés. Yet his work, and the style that is so very much his own, shows every promise of endurance. His books are as wine bequeathed to infants ; their own maturity waits for that of their consumers. Winters of Content and other Discursions will find a public readier now than in 1925 or 1932.
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