SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
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Nothing is more difficult than to persuade an apparently well-educated foreigner that the English are good at writing poetry. The old idea of England as a nation of shopkeepers is still deeply rooted in the Continent, and what could be more incompatible with poetry than the practical and com- mercial instincts with which we have always been credited abroad P Only last year the writer of this notice met a Russian lady (a typical member of the intelligentsia, with all its pretensions to knowledge and education) who protested vehemently that there had never been any English poets— or, rather, there had only been three: "Shakespeare 1 Byron 1 Wilde! What other poets have you had P The English are wonderful at commerce—mail c'est un people sans time 1" This view of English poetry, with its extraordinary group of three names, is characteristic of opinion abroad, and even in France. The apparent paradox that our essentially level- headed race should excel in the most imaginative forms of literature is the subject of the Leslie Stephen Lecture on Poetry and National Character delivered last term in Cam- bridge by Professor W. MinaNei le Dixon, of Glasgow University (Cambridge University Press, ls. 6d. net); and his general conclusion is that we owe our poetry to the spirit of liberty and individualism that has always flourished among us.
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