" A staid, uninteresting life is here," writes Mr. Gilbert
Coleridge in his rhymed preface to Some and Sundry (Con- stable, 9s.), but he does himself an injustice. He may not have had many exciting passages in his career, but he has never been staid if Roget's Thesaurus is right in giving that epithet as a synonym for " serious, grim-visaged, wan." His habitual cheerfulness is reflected in these pages, whether he tells of Eton and Oxford in his schoolboy and undergraduate days, or of New York which he visited in 1883, or of the Law Courts in which most of his life has been passed. There are things in our twentieth-century existence which he dislikes. He does not care for the scent of petrol or the din of machinery. He considers the screen offers only a travesty of life. He deplores the neglect of the art of elocution by actors and actresses. But on the whole he thinks he was lucky to live in this age. His father, who was Lord Chief Justice of England, went to Eton on a stage coach with straw stuffed up his trousers to keep out the cold. Mr. Coleridge made the same journey in a cold railway train with no lavatory accommodation and no food on it. Now he can start from his own door in Devon, " at my own time, without tickets or porters go my own pace and arrive with my lungs filled with fresh air. I think I prefer the twentieth century to the early nineteenth."
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