20 SEPTEMBER 1930, Page 28

More Books of the Week

(Continued from page 885.) Three Men in a Boat has much to answer for. Whenever any three people combine to do anything in anything, be it (as in this ease) a collapsible rubber coracle, or aeroplane, or grocer's van, they at once cast back to Jerome's painful masterpiece, and almost inevitably revive some of its long outmoded and cheapish humour. Messrs. H. D. Eberlein, G. J. Marks and F. A. Wallis, the three authors of Down the Tiber and Up to Rome (Lippincott, 15s.) do so, and when their book records that "Harold was a gentleman down to the waist," or that "Frank shunned shorts" in favour of " elegant " pants, we, like the late Queen Victoria, are not amused. Fortunately, however, there are other aspects of the coadjutors' work (which describes a coracle voyage from Perugia to Rome), and there is much pleasant descriptive • writing about some of the lesser-known towns of Italy, their art and architecture, their histories, and their exquisite surroundings. Indeed it is the chief merit of this book that its authors exhort us to leave awhile the regular show- places, to turn towards some of the less visited places such as almost all of the hilltop towns in the Tiber Valley, and in them by tranquil study of their everyday incidents and occupations reach closer touch with the real life of the people. The visitor with this end in view will be greatly helped by Down the Tiber. In format the book is wholly charming with its good type and paper, broad margins and Mr. Frank Wallis's thoughtfully tender illustrations. But is " errour " really American for error, and if hare olim meminisse, &c., must be quoted, can it not be cited correctly ?

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