BOOKS
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS A MULTITUDE of reprints and line editions and translations have been sent us. The most notable of them, perhaps, is the edition of The Apocrypha, published by the Nonesuch. - Press. The same publishers have issued a new translation of The Symposium or Supper of Plato, made by Mr. Francis , Birrell and Mr. Shane Leslie. Mr. George Moore, desperate with himself for the cessation of his creative powers, deter- mined to keep himself exercised by translating some classic ; and, convinced that there was no translation of Daphnis and Chloe which he could not better, attempted to make a' perfect version from Amyot's French. So now we receive his Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe (Heinemann), and we can compare it with what has passed previously as the classical version. George Thornley, Mr. Moore announces, or makes his interlocutor announce, "followed the Greek story scene by scene in a rough sort of way ; but I do not think anybody would continue reading it for his pleasure, so dry and lumpy is his style, uncultivated rather than barren." A wicked judgment ! Thornley is diffuse, no doubt ; but he has more spirit than a hundred Mr. Moores.
The Manresa Press (Roehampton) publish an edition. of The Last Letters of Sir Thomas More, with a preface by Cardinal Gasquet. Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker has collected and edited the Letters of James Boswell (Clarendon Press). It is the same Boswell who -writes letters as the Boswell who reeorded Johnson. Perhaps he is a little more tender-hearted, a little prouder of his sensibility. "I 'had been exhausted by riding all forenoon," he writes once, "and expatiating upon rural beauties which I did not much feel. But, it is absurd to hope for continual happiness in this life. Few men, if any, enjoy it. I have a kind of belief that Edmund Burke does. He has so much knowledge, so much animation, and the consciousness of so much fame." He gets drunk and repents ; he has doubts of moral and religious truths and he recovers his faith ; falls in love prudently and prudently escapes.
Professor G. B. Churchill has edited Wycherley's The Country Wife, and The Plain Dealer for the Belles-Lettres Series (Heath and Co.). Messrs. Constable send us five volumes more of the Tudor Translations. Four are taken up by Mabbe's The Rogue, an early seventeenth-century translation of a Spanish picaresque novel. The remaining volume is B. R.'s Herodolus (1584), only the first two books of which were completed.
THE LITERARY EDITOR,
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