1 DECEMBER 1923, Page 31

BOOKS.

THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.

GEORGE HERBERT'S brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was a philosopher of note ; he was also a poet of the metaphysical school, staider and less " conceited " than many of them, full of good matter, and possessing his own share of the idiomatic lyricism of the age. Mr. G. C. Moore Smith has collected his Poems, English and Latin, for the Clarendon Press, and given them for the first time in a reliable text. We think that he overstates Lord Herbert's case when he claims that " in poetic feeling and art he soars above his brother George " ; when George Herbert laid his moralizing aside and wrote of his spiritual troubles he could produce astounding poetry ; but Edward Herbert has undoubtedly missed much of his due fame. Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton send us two volumes edited by Mr. Clement Shorter, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte and The Complete Poems of Charlotte Brontë. The tard work of collection, collation, arrangement, and annotation has in each volume been done by Mr. C. W. Hatfield ; Charlotte Bronte's poems had never been published in full. Another new edition of a poet's work is the Florence Press Byron (Chatto and Windus), edited by Mr. Grierson ; an excellent companion for the same press's Keats, Shelley, and Blake.

Two' books which will have " first edition " values arc pub- lished this week, and immediate mention should be made of them. One is Mr. Conrad's new novel, The Rover (T. Fisher Unwin), the other Land and Sea Tales, for Scouts and Guides (Macmillan), by Mr. Kipling. A great number of essays appreciative of a modern classic have been gathered by Mr. Scott Moncrieff in Marcel Proust : An English Tribute (Chatto and Windus). Mr. Conrad, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Middleton Murry, and Professor Saintsbury contribute to it ; but some of the younger writers, Mr. Edgell Rickword in particular, give the most interesting criticism. Mr. George Moore declined to join in the tribute, expressing his " inability to stomach Proust." Mr. Ivor Brown has written a monograph on H. G. Wells, for the Writers of the Day series (Nisbet). Mr. Brown is always forcible and alert.

A new manuscript of John Galt, author of the once cele- brated Annals of the Parish, has been discovered and given to the public by Mr. William Roughead in The Howdie and Other Tales (Foulis). Messrs. Routledge's valuable and important series, the Broadway Translations, continues to expand : the most interesting of the new volumes is the translation of Three Plays of Lunacharski. A. V. Lunacharski is the Bolshevik Commissar of Education ; one of the fantasies included in this volume, Vasilisa the Wise, we reviewed with enthusiasm earlier in the year ; the other two have not previously been translated.

Messrs. Benn earn the gratitude of all students of art by the illustrated books they publish : The Art of the Chinese Potter, by R. L. Hobson and A. L. Hetherington, is an admirable volume containing more than a hundred and fifty plates. The Winter Owl (Cecil Palmer) puts in a timely appearance ; it is a descendant of the previous Owl, a periodical which came out at long intervals, whenever its editors conceived that they had enough material of interest. The contributors to this number include Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Blunden, Mr. Robert Graves, Mr. Siegfried Sassoon, Mr. W. J. Turner, and Colonel Lawrence ; there are illustrations by Mr. Beerbohm, Mr. Frank Dobson, Mr. William Nicholson,